k^^ 




Coipght}!" 

COPVRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



Common People 



Common People 



BY 

Frank Oliver Hall 



/ will sing the song of Companionship. '''' 
—Whitman. 






BOSTON 
JAMES H. WEST COMPANY 



The LiBRARY OF 

GONGRESS, 
Two CoHi£3 RecetvED 

NOV. 18 1901 

COPVRIGHT ENTRY 

CLASS a-^ XXc. No. 

COPY a 



\s 



k 



^V" 



Copyright, 1901 

By Frank Oliver Hall and 

James H. West Co. 



THOSE AT WHOSE REQUEST 
THESE FAMILIAR TALKS HAVE BEEN PUT INTO PRINT 

MY FRIENDS IN MANY PLACES 

TO WHOM IT HAS BEEN MY PRIVILEGE TO 

PROCLAIM THE GOSPEL OF SERVICE 

EARNEST MEN AND WOMEN WHO HAVE HELPED ME 

BY THEIR SYMPATHY AND ENCOURAGED 

ME BY THEIR APPROVAL 

I AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATE 



Contents 



PAGE 

I. Common People at Home . . 13 

II. Common People at Work . . 39 

IIL Common People at Play ... 63 

IV. Common People at Study . . Sy 

V. Common People in Politics . . 113 

VI. Common People at Church . . 139 

VII. Common People as Neighbors . 167 

VIII. Common People Climbing . . 193 



r\N a certain occasion^ Abraham Lincoln 
overheard some one say, ^^ Isnt Lincobi 
a common - looking fellow ! " His comment 
was: ''Evidently the Almighty must like 
tis common - looking fellows, or he wouldn't 
have made so many of nsT 



I 

Common People at Home 



The one point you may be assured of is, that your hap- 
piness does not at all depend on the size of your house (or if 
it does, rather on its smallness than largeness) ; but depends 
entirely upon your having peaceful and safe possession of 
it — on your habits of keeping it clean and in order — on 
the materials of it being trustworthy, if they are no more 
than stone and turf — and on your contentment with it, so 
that gradually you mend it to your mind, day by day, and 
leave it to your children a better house than it was. To 
your children, and to theirs, desiring for them that they 
may live as you have lived ; and not strive to forget you, 
and stammer when any one asks who you were, because, 
forsooth, they have become fine folks by your help. 

— Ru skill. 

Another rule is not to let familiarity swallow up all 
courtesy. Many of us have a habit of sa}dng to those with 
whom we live such things as we say about strangers behind 
their backs. There is no place where real politeness is 
of more value than where we mostly think it would be su- 
perfluous. You may say more truth, or rather speak out 
more plainly, to your associates, but not less courteously 
than you do to strangers. — Sir Arthtir Helps. 

The manner of saving or of doing anything goes a great 
way in the value of the thing itself. It was well said by 
him that called a good office done harshly, and with ill- 
■VN-ill, a stony piece of bread ; it is necessary' for him who is 
hungry to receive it, but it almost chokes a man in the 
going down. — Seneca. 

(12) 



Common People 



Common People at Home 

-^ 

THERE is no country in the world where 
homes are so common as in America. 
This is accounted for by the fact that wealth 
is more equally distributed in our country than 
in any other part of the world ; there are more 
families which have an income ranging from 
one to five thousand dollars a year. One may 
find in portions of the old world lordly castles, 
but these are generally flanked by the hovels 
of poverty. He may view with delight mag- 



i^ Common People at Home 

niiicent palaces, but when he turns and gazes 
at the landscape he is likely to find it disfig- 
ured with the huts of hungry peasants. 

It was my fortune a few years ago to travel 
through a large portion of England on a bicycle. 
I often got far from the beaten track of the 
tourists, and found my way into many a delight- 
ful nook. It is a beautiful country, " a precious 
stone set in a silver sea." The most attractive 
object in all England is the estate of the 
country squire. The traveler sees a splendid 
house made of stone or brick and covered from 
foundation to turret w^ith ivy. He gets a 
ghmpse of this house through a bower of 
magnificent old trees. There is a lawn as 
smooth and as soft as velvet. Such lawns 
are found nowhere else. An American once 
asked an English gardener how to make a 
lawn like that, no doubt thinking to create 
such another about his own house. The gar- 
dener replied, " You must roll it and roll it, 
and mow it and mow it, then roll it and roll 
it, and mow it and mow it, and keep doing 



Common People at Home 15 

this for three hundred years." The beauty of 
the Enghsh country house is the product of 
many centuries. But an insignificant minority 
of the people dwell in such homes. One is 
sure to find in the immediate vicinity of these 
a multitude of stone huts, where a dozen 
people crowd into two rooms, and which con- 
tain few comforts and no luxuries whatever. 
In America, while there are to-day mansions 
as luxurious as any the old world affords, there 
are not so many of them. Neither are there 
so many hovels. The average home, the home 
of the common people, is better than the 
average home in other parts of the world. 

There is probably no part of America where, 
in proportion to the population, may be found 
so many comfortable and beautiful homes as 
in what we call ^'greater Boston." One may 
ride all day long through the streets of our 
suburbs with increasing delight at the sight 
of the unnumbered thousands of attractive 
homes. But even here home is not everything 
that it should be, or even everything that it 



1 6 Common People at Home 

might be. This is my reason for discussing 
this subject. 

First of all, then, let us speak of the phys- 
ical home — the house and its surroundings. 

People may talk as much as they please 
about home being where the heart is, this is 
only partially true. It is a task beyond human 
affection and intelligence to make a home out 
of a hovel. It is true that without affection 
the most luxurious mansion becomes only so 
much brick and mortar and paint. It is true 
that without sympathy betv/een husband and 
wife, parents and children, the greatest wealth 
becomes impotent to build a real home. But 
it is also true that affection and sympathy find 
it hard to survive the constant strain of evil 
physical conditions. And for one I do not 
wonder that a husband coming home at night 
to a miserable tenement, where the surround- 
ings are unsightly ; where the air is foul and 
the odors disgusting; where the furnishings 
are hideous and the food on the table loath- 
some — I do not wonder that such a man 



Common People at Home // 

comes to such a home with gloom and despair ; 
that words of love and sympathy freeze on his 
lips ; that he feels no strong thrill of affection 
for the wife and children dressed in dirty 
clothing and crowded together in two or three 
dingy rooms ; and that forthwith he hies him 
away to the brilliantly lighted saloon where at 
any rate warmth and good cheer are to be 
found. 

But if it is difficult for the man to bring 
strong affection and active sympathy to such 
a home, how much more difficult must it be 
for the woman to cultivate these qualities in 
such a home. It is as much the natural 
instinct of a woman to create a beautiful home 
as it is for the oriole to weave a graceful and 
comfortable nest. But suppose the oriole were 
imprisoned in such circumstances that she 
could find no straws and strings, but only mud 
and disgusting filth; suppose the bird must 
build her nest not on the Umb of a beautiful 
elm, but under the smoke-stack of some evil- 
smelHng factory, belching soot and ashes. 



i8 Common People at Home 

Little wonder if under such circumstances the 
nest becomes loathsome, and the bird herself 
loses the brightness of her plumage and the 
sweetness of her song. There are thousands 
of women who undertake to make an attractive 
home amid circumstances that absolutely debar 
success. Dirt and disorder prevail in spite 
of the most heroic effort to expel them. The 
woman becomes discouraged. Imprisoned amid 
circumstances which she loathes, she grows dis- 
heartened. She is asked to make bricks with- 
out straw. She surrenders to the encroach- 
ments of dirt and disorder. If any member 
of the family may be excused for desert- 
ing the home for the saloon it might well 
be the woman. But the glory of woman- 
hood is that she seldom does this. She fights 
against odds for the sake of the husband and 
the children, and in the end dies a heartbroken 
and pitiful death. 

There are thirty thousand people living in 
Boston to-day amid conditions pronounced by 
the Board of Health to be bad; living in 



Common People at Home ig 

tenement -houses amid unsightly and unsanitary 
surroundings ; living amid unconquerable dirt ; 
living where the odor of rum-shops and the 
hideous noise of the street — oaths, ribald 
songs, and drunken laughter — come floating 
into the window every time it is opened. 
There is a whole community of fifteen thousand 
people living without a private bath-tub. 
There are thousands upon thousands of chil- 
dren being reared amid circumstances where 
the only playground is the street and the door- 
steps of saloons. Under such circumstances 
the word home is irony. The first condition 
of a worthy home is its physical attractive- 
ness. That man proves himself the greatest 
public benefactor, the truest patriot, and the 
most sincere lover of his kind, who creates the 
opportunity for people such as those just con- 
sidered to live amid conditions that shall make 
a true home possible. 

The suburbs of Boston are building up very 
rapidly, but there are still great tracts of ter- 
ritory where might be erected little cottages 



20 Common People at Home 

beautiful to look at, each with a tiny door- 
yard glorified by a flowering shrub ; each 
with windows into which the sun could peep 
at morn, and through which could steal wafts 
of fresh, health-giving air. Such a cottage 
might be dainty within as well as without, its 
walls being made attractive by pretty paper, 
and having a fire-place which would on the 
winter's night speak good cheer to all v^rithin. 
All this could be done with the least sacrifice, 
for the rent which the dwellers in the slums 
pay for their poor tenements would give good 
interest on the money invested by the man 
who should set himself the task of constructing 
such cottages. 

We associate vice with the dirtiest and most 
repulsive portions of our cities. Vice naturally 
finds its dwelling-place in the slums. And 
why should it not .? We all are the creatures 
of our environment. Place a man amid loath- 
some circumstances and he will instinctively 
turn to find something in the way of a narcotic 
that he may put into his stomach and which 



Common People at Home 21 

will help him to forget the hideousness of his 
life. We talk about building institutions in 
our cities which shall contain reading-rooms, 
game-rooms, lunch-rooms, and by their bright- 
ness and attractiveness run opposition to the 
saloon. Good ! But the best institution with 
which to oppose the saloon is the attractive 
home. Drunkenness and licentiousness are 
means by v/hich many persons seek to escape 
the consciousness of the hells which they are 
compelled by the force of circumstances to 
inhabit. Give the people decent homes, and 
from these shall go forth the forces that will 
in the end destroy the haunts of vice. 

There is one fact to which the attention of 
men interested in the future of our community 
should be immediately called. Many houses 
are being erected in our suburbs to-day which 
are attractive enough at first, but which are 
the seeds of future slums. With the desire 
to gain the largest possible immediate income 
from the smallest possible investment, many 
houses are thrown together without substance 



22 Common People at Home 

or durability. These consist of a few thin 
pieces of joist, covered with paper and clap- 
boarding. Paint and paper conceal the sham 
and make the whole attractive for the time. 
But what will happen in a few years } These 
shells will inevitably degenerate. They cannot 
be repaired because there is nothing to repair. 
They become more and more disreputable, 
until in twenty years they have in their turn 
degenerated into slums. The authorities of 
Boston are destroying many unsanitary build- 
ings in these days, but where they destroy or 
compel to be renovated one such building a 
score of others are being erected which anon 
become unsanitary and unsightly. Homes 
for the people should not only be attractive 
for the moment, they should be permanent, 
if in the end the latter condition of the com- 
munity is not to be worse than the first. Give 
the people homes, beautiful without, attractive 
within ; homes which will withstand the rav- 
ages of time and will not degenerate into 
hovels. 



Common People at Home 2j 

But we should not overlook the fact that 
much depends upon the people who inhabit 
the homes. The most attractive natural sur- 
roundings may be made repulsive by those 
who live in them. Who has not seen from a 
distance some pretty farm-house and exclaimed 
at its natural beauty ? Situated on the side 
of a hill, with an orchard climbing beyond, 
with noble trees shading the house, with the 
slope of green grass running to the road, it 
is very beautiful from a distance. But you 
approach it, and as you draw near you dis- 
cover that the front yard is made the repository 
of the family wood-pile. The wood might 
just as well be at the rear, but oxen would have 
been obliged to haul the load a Httle farther, 
and so it is dumped at the front, and the 
ground is littered with wood and chips and 
bark. The bushes in the door-yard are allowed 
to wallow in the dirt ; the path to the front 
door is grown up to weeds. One must go to 
the back door in order to enter, for it is obvious 
that the front entrance is never used. Inside 



2^ Common People at Home 

there is first of all the kitchen, with bare floor 
and bare walls, and redolent with the odor of 
cooking mingled with the smell of the barn. 
There is a parlor, but it is never opened except 
for funerals, and the air has not been changed 
in years ; the curtains are drawn tight and it is 
the gloomiest place on earth. There is a fire- 
place, but it is stopped up with a screen. 
There are pictures on the v/all, but they are 
hideous counterparts of deceased ancestors. 
There are books on the table, but they must 
never be touched with sacrilegious hands. 
Very likely there is a piano or organ in this 
room, but it is out of tune, and the music 
placed so orderly on the top is twenty-five years 
old. There are bed-rooms in the house, plenty 
of them, but they all are ahke cheerless and 
comfortless. And so this house that might 
be made so sunny and attractive is repulsive, 
because the people who inhabit it have made 
no attempt to make it otherv/ise. 

There are many such places in New England, 
and there are many homes in our cities which 



Common People at Home 2^ 

are no better. In the name of all that is 
beautiful in home life, push up the curtains, 
open the windows, build a fire in the fire-place, 
send the ancestors to the attic where they 
belong, get some pictures of beautiful girls 
and children which are given away as adver- 
tisements, if you can afford nothing else, and 
pin them on the walls, have the piano tuned, 
buy a dollar's worth of modern music, buy a 
chess-board and some modern books, and put 
them where they will be easy to reach. Then 
clear up the yard, trim the bushes, and make 
the old home as attractive as God will let you. 
Thus you will begin to live, and life will take 
on a new interest and a new purpose. 

But if there are homes that are too bad 
there are others that are too good. Every- 
thing is too fine to be used. One feels like a 
sinner for putting his feet on the carpet ; he 
has a sensation as if he were walking on an 
oil-painting. How beautiful the furniture is ! 
He picks out the most worn chair and sits 
down in it easily lest he should scratch it. 



26 Common People at Home 

There is a fire-place that is a work of art. 
Carved oak, beautiful tiles, bricks that have 
never known a particle of smoke or soot. 
Arranged in this fire-place are immaculate 
birch logs. No one has ever had the hardihood 
to touch a match to that heap. Come back 
in ten years and you shall find these same 
logs, that have been regularly dusted like the 
bric-a-brac on the mantel above. Heaven pity 
the child brought up in a home like that ! 
'^ Don't put your hands on the mantel. Don't 
put your feet on the cushions. Don't touch 
the logs in the fire-place. Don't handle that 
book on the table. Don't shout. Don't laugh. 
Don't breathe." So the boy goes to the livery- 
stable, where he can sit with all his weight on 
an up-turned bucket and feel comfortable. 
Nothing in the house ought to be too good to 
use. Better a splint-bottomed chair that one 
can sit in than a mahogany chair made to look 
at. Touch a match to your immaculate birch 
sticks in the fire-place. Let us see a little 
soot on the beautiful bricks. Many a boy has 



Common People at Home 2^ 

run away from a home too hideous to be 
attractive. Many another has deserted a home 
too beautiful to be used. Comfort is the main 
thing. Let us be comfortable. 

But the home is not merely physical. Many 
a man thinks, if he only provides a house that 
is beautiful v/ithout and within, with hot and 
cold water on every floor, and a well-stocked 
larder in the basement, that he has done his 
whole duty. Many a woman thinks, if she 
looks after the sweeping and dusting and 
cooking, that she has done her full duty. In 
fact this is only the beginning. There must 
be affection between husband and wife ; love 
between parents and children. Better a three- 
room cottage with love in it than a mansion 
empty of affection. Every effort must be 
made not only to win but to keep the affection 
of the inmates of the home. Strange, is it 
not, that young men and women should strive 
so hard to win each others' affection, and 
immediately after marriage, which is the begin- 
ning of home-building, should be so careless 



28 Common People at Home 

about preserving affection ? With what care the 
young man makes his toilet, six months before 
his marriage, when he knov/s that he is to meet 
a certain young lady ! With what infinite pains 
the young lady looks after every detail of her 
dress when she knows the 3^oung man is to 
call ! But a year later, six months after mar- 
riage, any old suit is good enough. A year 
after marriage the young man will feel at lib- 
erty to use language, in the presence of his 
wife, which he knows would have broken the 
engagement a month prior to the wedding-day. 
A year after marriage the young woman will 
indulge in bursts of temper which would have 
sent the young man to the ends of the earth 
a year and a half before. Why should we 
expect affection to endure a strain of evil words, 
bad temper, unsightly toilets, subsequent to 
marriage, when it would not have stood the 
strain previous to marriage } If the love of 
a woman is w^orth winning, it is worth keeping. 
If to win the regard of a man is worth effort, to 
preserve such regard is worth continual labor. 



Common People at Home 2g 

Most of the breaches between husband and wife 
occur within the first year of the wedding-day. 
Divorces are much more frequent between 
newly married people than between old married 
people. Strange that a man should allow 
himself to act toward his wife as he would 
never think of acting toward any one else ! 
Strange that a woman should use language to 
her husband that she would never dream of 
using to any other man ! If the home is to 
be a happy one, constant effort must be made 
to conserve the affection of its inmates. 

And this is true not only between husband 
and wife, it is also true between parents and 
children. There are parents who feel that 
they have a right to command the affection 
of their children. Affection is never com- 
manded. Love is not the creature of the 
will. One cannot say, ''Go to, now, I will 
love such a person." One may not say to 
another, even to a child, " Nov/, then, love me. 
It is your duty to love me. Do your duty." 
It is not a child's duty to love any one who is 



JO Common People at Home 

unlovely. It is a child's duty to obey his 
parents unless the command is altogether 
immoral. The parent may enforce obedience. 
But no parent is strong enough to enforce 
love, because it is the nature of affection not 
to yield to force. Think of a father coming 
home every night ugly, with a scowl on his 
face and harsh words on his lips ; think of 
this father always ready with a blow for some 
infraction of arbitrary law, and never with a 
word of praise or commendation. And then 
try to imagine that father feeling resentment 
toward his children because they do not love 
him. He has no right to expect love. There 
are children who love their mothers and have 
no affection for their fathers. Home is cheer- 
ful and beautiful from eight o'clock in the 
morning till six o'clock at night. But when 
the father's step is heard at the front door, the 
laughter dies, the songs cease, and a horrible 
fear takes the place of joy in the lives of the 
boys and girls. God pity the man who does 
not know that if he is to have the love of his 



Common People at Home J/ 

children he must pay the price for it — and 
that price is sympathy, kind conduct and lov- 
ing words. 

In the same way, there are children who 
love their fathers and secretly hate their 
mothers, though of these there are not so 
many. The mother is constantly nagging 
them 1 Women do not whip so much as men, 
but they nag more. Think of a woman who 
scolds, scolds, scolds from morning till night, 
with never a word of sympathy or affection 
for the little people, and who yet expects her 
children to love her ! There has been a mighty 
revolt in our time against corporal punishment. 
There ought to have been. That saying of 
Solomon's, ** He that spareth the rod hateth 
his son," has encouraged more brutality than 
any other that was ever written. In most 
cases, where a child is whipped, the whipping 
ought to be given to the parent. There may 
be cases where a child deserves and ou2:ht to 
receive physical punishment, but such cases 
are few in a life-time. But there is something 



32 Common People at Home 

that is infinitely worse than a whipping. It 
is constant nagging and scolding. One will 
say, ''My father used to punish me with a 
birch rod, and I loved him to the day of his 
death." Another will say, " My mother used 
a strap when I disobeyed, and I shall cherish 
affection for her memory as long as I live." 
Love may survive a cane or a strap, and even 
be grateful for these. But love cannot survive 
constant fault-finding, never-ending nagging. 
The home should be a place of many, many, 
many kind words, loving expressions, sym- 
pathetic smiles, and of few, very, very few 
words of reproof, scowls, fault-findings, — and 
of fewer punishments. The aim of every 
member of the home should be to preserve 
all the affection that it contains, and to increase 
this, as the years pass, by kindness, self-sac- 
rifice and sympathy. 

^ There is in every house what has been 
called a spiritual atmosphere. In one house 
there will be an atmosphere of gloom, suspicion, 
jealousy, and even hatred. In another the 



Common People at Home jj 

atmosphere is saturated with kindness and 
good cheer. There are houses into which 
every one dehghts to go. The moment he 
passes the front door he feels the good cheer 
of the household. There are other homes 
into which every one dislikes to go, for the 
moment he crosses the threshold he is im- 
pressed with the hatefulness of the place. In 
the first house he feels like laughing, singing, 
telling his best story. In the second he can 
think of no story to tell ; laughter dies, and a 
song would seem out of place. There is a 
subtle spiritual communication between soul 
and soul. Modern investigations into psychol- 
ogy have proven this beyond the possibility of 
dissent. It is possible for one person so to 
influence another that this second mind will 
think the same thought and experience the 
same sentiment. The extreme illustration of 
this we call hypnotism. John D. Quackenbos, 
an eminent writer and professor of psychology, 
is just now performing remarkable experiments 
in changing the mental attitude of people, 



j^ Common People at Home 

especially of children. Persons whose Hves, 
from one cause or another, are irrepressibly 
gloomy come to him for hypnotic treatment. 
One woman has a thought, which will not doA\Ti, 
that she is going insane. A man thinks that 
he has committed the unpardonable sin. A 
woman feels that she is unable to perform the 
simplest duties. He throws them into the 
hypnotic trance, suggests to what is called 
their " sublimmal mind " that the delusion shall 
pass and the life take on a cheerful, hopeful 
tone, — and this is accomplished, often by a 
single suggestion. Sometimes children are 
brought to him, incorrigible bo}-s, evil-minded 
girls, and he is able in the hypnotic trance to 
suggest a different thought of hfe that casts 
out the evil tendencies. 

Now, what is done in this wa}- by hypnotism 
is being constantly done by wise people in the 
ordinary course of life. Human nature is 
infinitely susceptible to suggestions. IMothers 
repeatedly use this method. The child is 
intent upon doing something he ought not to 



Common People at Home J5 

do. The foolish mother cries, " Don't ! " and, 
if the child persists, punishes. The wise 
mother undertakes to turn the mind of the 
child away from evil by suggesting some better 
thought. The child is intent upon cutting 
her clothes with the scissors. The mother 
says, "What fun it would be to cut these 
pictures out of this paper." The boy is intent 
upon quarreling. The father suggests that it 
would be pleasant to cultivate a garden or 
make a boat. So the evil in the child is over- 
come by good. A bad boy is only a lad with 
energy misdirected. The same energy that 
would lead him, if left to himself, to chop 
down a cherry-tree would induce him to plant 
one, or to chop kindhng-wood. 

There are houses where the whole atmos- 
phere is saturated with evil suggestion. And 
the evil influence is often exerted negatively. 
By constantly forbidding children to do certain 
things, their minds are not turned away from 
the evil desires, but rather toward them. One 
little fellow, who was forbidden to go to the 



^6 Common People at Home 

pantry and help himself to cake, was told that, 
when the temptation came, he was to say, 
"Get thee behind me, Satan." He ate the 
cake, and, when asked if he had used the 
formula, he replied, " Yes, I said, ' Get thee 
behind me, Satan,' and he did, and pushed me 
straight into the closet." That is simple and 
psychological. The only way to overcome 
evil in Hfe is to fill one's mind and heart so 
full of good that there is no room left for the 
bad. 

Let us fill our homes with noble thought, 
cheerful atmosphere, loving sentiments ; with 
respect, affection, truth and honor, to such an 
extent that there will be no room for envy, 
spite, malice or lies. 



II 
Common People at Work 



They who tread the path of labor follow where Christ's 

feet have trod ; 
They who work without complammg do the holy will of 

God. 
Where the weary toil together, there am I among my own; 
Where the tired workman sleepeth, there am I with him 

alone. 

This is the Gospel of Labor — ring it, ye bells of the kirk ; 
The Lord of Love came do\\Ti from above to live with the 
men who work. — Henry Van Dyke. 

Shall you complain, who feed the world, 
Who clothe the world, who house the world ? 
Shall you complain, who are the world, 

Of what the world may do ? 
As from this hour you use your power, 

The w^orld must follow you. 

The world's Hfe hangs on your right hand. 
Your strong right hand, your skilled right hand ; 
You hold the whole world in your hand — 

See to it w^hat you do ! 
Or dark or light, or vrrong or right, 

The world is made by you ! 

Then rise as you ne'er rose before, 
Nor hoped before, nor dared before, 
And show, as ne'er was shown before, 

The power that lies in you ! 
Stand all as one till right is done ! 
Believe and dare and do 1 

— Charlotte Perkins Stetson. 
(38) 



II 



Common People at Work 



ONE might easily find many texts in 
our Bible from which to preach any 
number of sermons on work. Most important 
of all is the fourth commandment, which pro- 
claims the duty of resting one day in seven. 
We ordinarily see in this only an injunction 
to abstain from labor. But listen : '^ Six days 
shalt thou labor and do thy work." Strange 
that men should so largely have lost sight of 
the first part of this commandment, which 
has to do with six-sevenths of life, and have 
paid attention to that portion which has to do 
with only one-seventh ! 



^o Common People at Work 

The man who works seven days in the week 
is still thought to be a social sinner, — and 
rightly, for his influence is against the best life 
of the community. But the man who engages 
in no helpful labor, the idler whose life is given 
up merely to seeking his own pleasure, is six 
times as great a sinner, for his influence is 
vastly more to the detriment of society. We 
have organizations formed to induce men to 
keep Sunday, and on our statute-books are 
many laws commanding men to abstain from 
labor on that day. We need much more an 
organization whose business it shall be to see 
that all persons obey the first part of the 
commandment, " Six days shalt thou labor 
and do thy share of the world's work." 

It was the habit of the ancients to look 
upon labor as a disgrace. The Jews were not 
much afflicted with this idea. They honored 
labor above any other ancient people, but even 
in our Bible we may catch here and there an 
expression of the thought that to work with 
one's hands is an evil and a curse. Thus the 



Common People at Work 41 

poet who wrote the story of the " Garden of 
Eden " makes the Almighty say to Adam, as 
the man is expelled for his disobedience from 
the delights of Paradise, " Cursed is the ground 
on thy account ; in toil shalt thou eat of it all 
the days of thy life ; thorns also and thistles 
shall it bring forth to thee ; and thou shalt 
eat the herbs of the field ; in the sweat of 
thy face shalt thou eat bread." And if we 
turn to the literature of other ancient peoples 
we shall find the thought that labor is a curse 
and a disgrace much more plainly expressed. 
Said Cicero, "All artisans are engaged in a 
disgraceful occupation." Aristotle declared 
that " The best regulated cities will not permit 
a mechanic to be a citizen, for it is impossible 
for one who leads the life of a mechanic, or 
hired servant, to practise a life of virtue. 
Some were born to be slaves." But, thank 
heaven, we have so far reversed the thought 
that any kind of labor is incompatible with 
virtue, that all right-minded men see plainly 
that he alone can be virtuous who does labor, 



42 Common People at Work 

with hand or with brain, for the common 
good. 

The first proposition, then, to be laid down 
is this : Every one, whether man or woman, 
ought to engage in some regular occupation 
by which the sum of the world's happiness is 
increased. No one can be ethically exempt 
from this rule. The exact opposite of Aris- 
totle's proposition is true. No one can be 
virtuous who does not work. I care not how 
much wealth a man's ancestors may have 
accumulated and bequeathed to him, — that 
should not exempt him from industrious 
labor. 

We all see this plainly enough if we reduce 
the situation to a smaller scale. Imagine a 
single family occupying a fertile island. The 
head of the family dies and leaves to each of 
his five sons a section of the land. It happens 
that on one section lies the only spring of fresh 
water. The son who owns this calmly folds 
his hands and says, " Henceforth I will do 
nothing but enjoy myself. Those who want 



Common People at Work ^j 

water must give me what I will." So his 
brothers till the land for him, build his house 
for him, weave his clothes for him, wait upon 
himi, amuse him, because he possesses the only 
spring of water, and they must have water or 
die. He does nothing to add to the general 
welfare. Instantly we recognize that such 
a man is a parasite, that the mere possession 
of this spring does not ethically exempt him 
from the obligation to help cultivate the soil 
and build houses. 

Now enlarge this. The human race is one 
great family. And the men who happen to 
possess the springs of water, or the springs of 
coal, or the springs of gold, are not exempt 
from helping on the general welfare by labor. 
We inhabitants of the earth are like so many 
men on a raft with a limited supply of food. 
If nothing is added the whole accumulated 
supply will be exhausted in a few months. 
The only hope is that every one shall lend a 
hand to propel the raft forward toward further 
supplies. What shall we think of the men 



44 Common People at Work 

and women on the raft who never lend a hand 
at the oar, and who insist upon having a double 
supply of the rations, and then pride them- 
selves upon being of superior quality because 
they do not help, who sneer at those who are 
really pushing the raft ahead because their 
hands are hard and their brows covered with 
sweat ? 

But there is a further reason why men 
ought to work — work with their hands. 
Modern investigations into psychology have 
revealed the fact that no one can be a com- 
plete man unless he does work. There are 
areas of the brain which develop only through 
manual labor. This discovery is destined to 
revolutionize our whole system of education. 
The idea has been that education is that which 
one gets from uooks. The boy who is study- 
ing Greek is being educated. The other boy, 
who is constructing a box or digging a ditch 
or planting potatoes, is not being educated. 
We have but just discovered that the boy who 
digs the ditch or makes the box is developing 



Common People at Work ^5 

brain-capacity that the first boy with all his 
education will never possess. Work, skillful 
labor, is Nature's method for the increase of 
intellectual ability. 

This fact explains many others that have 
seemed like great mysteries. How often it 
happens that some lad from the country, who 
has worked on a farm nine months in the year, 
and been to school three months, in a little 
back-woods school-house where the teaching 
was primitive and most incompetent — how 
often it happens that such a boy will come to 
the city and march straight ahead of the 
young men from the " best " families who have 
received all the intellectual training that the 
"best" schools and colleges could give. It 
seems like a miracle, but the explanation is 
simple. The country lad, thrcfigh the various 
labor of the farm, has brought into exercise 
areas of brain that have never been devel- 
oped in the training of the city boy. So it is 
the city lad who is handicapped in the race, 
and not the country boy at all. Some of the 



^6 Common People at Work 

brainiest statesmen, merchants, mechanics 
that this country has ever produced have been 
boys forced to work almost from infancy. I 
have heard such men regret that they were 
not properly educated. As a matter of fact 
they were better educated than ninety-nine out 
of the hundred college graduates. 

This brings me to another proposition. 
Every one has a right to work. We hear 
much of this right. It is a claim put forward 
by working-men, and generally made when 
times are hard and work scarce. '' The Dec- 
laration of Independence," says the working- 
man out of work, " affirms that a man has a 
right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. 
But I cannot live, my family will starve, with- 
out work. Liberty ! How can a man be free 
unless there is an opportunity to exchange 
labor for bread t Pursuit of happiness ! How 
can one hope to be happy unless there is work 
to be obtained by which he may keep his hom^e 
and feed its inmates } " But that is not the 
whole of the story. We have come to realize 



Common People at Work ^7 

that every child born in America has a right 
to education. So we build the common schools, 
and furnish free text-books and free teachers. 
No child shall be deprived of this right. He 
shall be taught. But we have seen that no 
one can develop the largest capacity even of 
intellect unless he works with his hands. So 
the boy has the same right to work that he 
has to a common school education. 

I wonder how long it will be before we 
realize that it is cheaper to grant this right 
than it is to overlook it t We all realize that 
it is cheaper to build school-houses than it is 
to build jails ; that it is more economical to 
keep boys and girls in well-equipped schools 
than it is to keep them in reformatories. We 
have not yet learned that it is cheaper and 
vastly better to provide work for idle hands 
than it is to let them find the mischief that 
idleness permits for them. "We should all 
remember that society must support all its 
members, all its robbers, thieves and paupers. 
Every vagabond and vagrant has to be fed 



48 Common People at Work 

and clothed ; society must support in some 
way all of its members. It can support them 
in jail, in asylums, in hospitals and in pen- 
itentiaries, but it is a very costly way. We 
have to employ judges to try them, juries to 
sit upon their cases, sheriffs, marshals and 
constables to arrest them, policemen to watch 
them, and it may be at last a standing army 
to put them down. It would be far cheaper 
probably to support them at a first-class hotel. 
They let us go on the one hand simply to take 
us by the other, and we can take care of them 
as paupers and criminals, or by wise states- 
manship help them to be honest and useful 
men," 

But this right to work is one which be- 
longs not merely to the poor, who must labor, 
steal, or starve; it belongs as well to those 
who by their riches are exempt from the 
necessity for working. Inestimable wrongs 
are being done by parents to their own 
children, — wrongs that can never be atoned 
for; and what is more, these wrongs are 



Common People at Work ^p 

committed in the spirit of entire kindness and 
perfect self-sacrifice. How often we hear 
men who have been obHged all their lives to 
toil unremittingly, and who by toil have won 
that intelligence and self-mastery which has 
enabled them to amass large wealth — how 
often we hear such men say, ^' My boy shall 
not be obliged to work as I have. He shall 
be freed from the necessity to labor." And 
so, out of pure affection, but with mistaken 
judgment, the father takes upon himself the 
labor which the son ought to perform, and 
heaps a curse upon the boy's head where he 
meant to bless him. 

And if there are many such fathers, there 
are as many more mothers to match them. 
These mothers take upon themselves all the 
care of the household, in order that the girl 
may be free to pursue her intellectual devel- 
opment unhindered and seek without restraint 
the happiness which the mother feels she has 
missed. Is there a bed to make, or a garment 
to mend, or a dinner to get } *^ Mother will 



5<5 Common People at Work 

look after it." And so the girl grows up 
without skill of hand and lacking in that moral 
fiber which comes alone from a sense of mas- 
tery, a power to do something. The boy 
develops into a fop, who very likely possesses 
much book-learning, — that is, knowledge 
stored in the memory and obtained at second 
hand, — but without the ability or the strenuous 
character to use it. The girl becomes a silly 
and conceited butterfly, who esteems the high- 
est aim in life that of having a good time. 
And who is to blame } Not the boy ; not the 
girl. The blame belongs to the parents, who 
through kindness but mistaken judgment have 
wrought this evil upon their own offspring. 

If there are many people in this world who 
have too little money, so that they cannot get 
enough to eat or enough to read or time to 
think or study, and so lack development on 
account of the want of nourishment of body 
and mind, there are many more who are cursed 
by too much money, who are freed by their 
possessions from the necessity for toil, and so 



Common People at Work 57 

remain "arrested developments" through the 
lack of exercise. Sometimes when a family 
that has lived in idleness and luxury loses its 
money, the world exclaims in sympathy, '* What 
a pity ! " Men cry, *' These people have never 
been used to work. How hard it will be. 
What a pity ! " In the sight of God it is not 
a pity but a blessing. There are many fam- 
ilies to which could come no better fortune 
than to lose every dollar they possess, so that 
the girls would be obliged to keep books or 
sew or even wash and iron for a living, and so 
that the boy if he would go to college must 
fight his own way through. If only by the 
loss of fortune young men and women can win 
the right to work, then blessed be the loss. 
It is more important that one should live out 
his full life, develop his full capacity, than that 
he should be happy. 

Let us, therefore, have done with envy. 
No man is to be envied who is the daily 
drudge of his own possessions. No man is 
to be envied who is exempt from the necessity 



^2 Common People at Work 

to work. No man is to be pitied because cir- 
cumstances compel him to exertion, that is, to 
labor. Nature loves the working-man, the 
man who toils with muscles and returns home 
to dine on coarse food. See how she peoples 
that home with children, and how niggardly 
she is to the home of the wealthy ! She 
sends one child or none at all to the mansion, 
and a dozen to the cottage of the working- 
man. Nature is wise. She knows the kind 
of people most needed, and produces them. 

But there is another side to all this. There 
is such a thing as over-work, work amid condi- 
tions that no human being ought to be obliged 
to endure, — hard, body-exhausting, soul- 
depressing work, without suitable reward and 
without hope. Edwin Markham has designated 
the person who toils hopelessly and endlessly 
against the fearful odds that m.any have to 
face, '^ The Man under the Stone." 



"When I see a working-man with mouths to feed, 
Up day after day in the dark before the dawn, 
And coming home, night after night, thro' the dusk, 



Common People at Work 5J 

Swinging forward like some fierce silent animal, 

I see a man doomed to roll a huge stone up an endless 

steep. 
He strains it onward inch by stubborn inch, 
Crouched always in the shadow of the rock ; — 
See where he crouches, twisted, cramped, misshapen ! 

He lifts for their life I 

The veins knot and darken — 

Blood surges into his face : 

Now he loses — now he wins — 

Now he loses — loses — (God of my soul ! ) 

He digs his feet into the earth — 

There's a moment of terrified effort. . . . 
Will the huge stone break his hold, 
And crush him as it plunges to the gulf? 

" The silent struggle goes on and on, 
Like two contending in a dream." 

While we glorify work, let us not forget 
that hopeless and unrequited toil is slavery. 
There is no beauty nor joy in such labor. 
Our sympathy should go out to '^he man 
under the stone." 

We are living in an age when the work of 
the world is undergoing a radical revolution. 
What I have said about the necessity for labor, 
in order that the highest capacity of the brain 
and character may be developed, pertains to 



5^ Common People at Work 

skillful labor. Mere drudgery does not have 
that effect. Rather, it stupefies. And a large 
part of the work of our time is drudgery. 

The other day I talked with an old man 
who began his career as a shoemaker, nearly 
seventy years ago. " In those days," he said, 
"men used to work thirteen hours a day. 
Each shoemaker took a piece of leather, and, 
with kit of tools and lap-stone, made a whole 
shoe." Still, those were the times that pro- 
duced learned shoemakers. To make a shoe 
thus cultivates skill of hand, skill of eye, and 
so develops capacity to think. A man could 
work thirteen hours a day like that, and grow 
as a result of the work. Ten hours' work a 
day in the shoe-factory of our time is enough 
to paralyze mental faculty. What is the dif- 
ference } This : no man makes a shoe to-day. 
He makes a small part of a shoe, and does 
this over and over and over again, until his 
hands become a part of the machine he 
operates, and he need not think at all. A 
girl sits beside her machine and presses a 



Common People at Work ^^ 

lever. Down comes a die and cuts from the 
sheet of leather which she holds a certain 
form. Then she shifts the leather, presses 
the lever again, and down comes the die. 
This she does a thousand times in ten hours. 
She does not think. The machine thinks for 
her. Automatically it does the counting. 
One year of sitting on a stool and poking a 
piece of leather under a die would, if she did 
nothing else, be enough to spoil the mind of a 
Margaret Fuller. 

I went into a factory where spectacles are 
made in vast quantities. The superintendent 
told me that when he began the work he took 
a rough lens, and ground it, took gold wire 
and bent it, and made the spectacles himself. 
He did it all. He was a skillful mechanic, a 
man of great ability, capable of taking hold 
of any problem in mechanics, ethics, politics, 
and of thinking it out, and this capacity had 
been developed by his skillful use of hand and 
eye and brain in his work of creating something 
out of raw material. Then he showed me 



^6 Common People at Work 

about the factory. I noticed particularly two 
men who sat side by side, each making a 
peculiar motion once in a second. It was the 
business of one of these men to cut the slot 
in the head of a tiny screw which holds the 
bows of the spectacles together. That was all 
that he did. He did it many hundreds of times 
a day. The man next to him, by one motion 
of the wrist, polished the head of the same 
screw. Any man can acquire that motion in 
a week, and then there is nothing more to 
learn, nothing more to think about. He 
becomes a part of the machine. " Pretty 
soon," said the superintendent, "our inventor 
wdll hit upon a de\'ice for doing these things 
altogether by machinery, and then these men 
will be thrown out and the operator will know 
no more about the manufacture of spectacles 
than a five-year-old child." Labor of all sorts 
is being subdivided in this way, and the man 
is becoming a part of the machine he 
operates. 

Now, there are those who do not believe in 



Common People at Work ^y 

shorter hours for working men and women. 
" Men used to work thirteen hours a day, why 
should they not now ? " Simply because thir- 
teen hours of labor in factory or shop such as 
I have indicated, and this continued for years, 
would mean the production of a race of idiots. 
Ten hours is too much. We must shorten 
the hours, vary the occupations, teach people 
to , work skillfully and create something. 
Otherwise the next generation will show 
marks of degeneration. 

We shall, of course, never go backvv^ard to 
the old method of making things by hand. 
Let us by all means go forward to the time 
when by the labor of all enough for all can 
be produced in eight hours' work, five hours' 
work, so that the brain and hand may be 
released to busy themselves about something 
that shall minister to the soul's growth. If, by 
force of necessity, one is engaged in the com- 
mon drudgery of doing the same thing over 
and over and over again, he should have not 
only a vocation, but an avocation. His voca- 



^8 Common People at Work 

tion may be drudgery. His avocation should 
be the doing of something completely, because 
he loves to do it. He should have time for 
his avocation, that is, time to grow. I doubt 
not that the day will come, as Mr. Bellamy 
and William Morris have prophesied, when by 
co-operation men shall be able to supply in a 
few hours' work all the necessities of man- 
kind ; that more attention will be given to 
making things beautiful, doing work skillfully, 
so that the shoemaker shall not only man- 
ufacture thousands of shoes but shall be 
ambitious to make the best possible shoe. 
A time will come when men will make chairs, 
hats, spectacles, bread and books as well as 
they can, and the overseer shall say to his 
working-people, not, " Hurry ! hurry ! and 
make the most," but '' Carefully ! carefully ! 
make the best. Take all the time you want 
to do the best possible work you are capable 
of doing." 

When we have reached that time, when the 
world through the development of machinery 



Common People at Work jp 

shall be released from the necessity for drudg- 
ery, and men may give time and thought to 
doing their best instead of being urged on to 
do their most, we shall see such an increase 
of intellectual capacity as the world never 
knew. More, we shall see the world grown 
wonderfully happy. For the highest happiness 
to which one can attain comes from having 
done one's best and produced something of 
beauty and value, the possession of which will 
give joy to another. 

In the meantime let no one, however humble 
his occupation, hold his own toil in contempt. 
Any work is better than no work. He alone 
is worthy of our respect who through toil is 
helping the world on its upward way. Men 
have sung the praise of great inventors, great 
merchants, great manufacturers, successful 
men of affairs on a large scale. This is right. 
Such men are worthy of praise, and for the 
most part these men commenced to work with 
their hands for a small wage. But in our 
praise of the great, of those who have sue- 



6o Common People at Work 

ceeded, let us not forget the many small, who 
make such greatness possible ; let us remem- 
ber those who have not "succeeded," as the 
world counts success, yet who still continually 
and contentedly go about the day's work. 

" Here's to the man in the engine-room, 
And here's to the toihng masses, 
Here's to the girl at the kitchen-range 
And here's to the working-classes ! 

" Here's to the gripman, here's to the guard, 
Here's to the cop on his beat, 
The laboring-man who builds the trench 
And him who sweeps the street. 

" My thanks to all who watch at night, 
Or work on Sundays too, — 
And you, the women who cook their meals, 
My heart goes out to you ! 

" Here's to the poor in the sweating-shops. 
Here's to the stifling nights. 
Here's to those that are being robbed. 
Here's to their getting their rights ! 

" For they who hunger and thirst shall know 
The Lord of creation and birth ; 
So here's my hand to the common man. 
For he shall inherit the earth." 



Ill 
Common People at Play 



Thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou and thy son, and 
thy daughter, thy man-servant and thy maid-servant, and 
the Levite, the stranger, and the fatherless, and the widow 
that is within thy gates. — DetUeronomy. 

Do not go back to monkish days and take on ascetic 
ideas of religion. If you mil go back, go to Jewish times, 
where men worshiped largely in festivities ; where, when 
they came to the temple, they came with such outbursts of 
pleasure, such uproarious rejoicings, that the writers who 
described the tumult which prevailed on such occasions 
spoke of it as the sounds of mighty thunderings and the 
voice of many waters. The Jews were cheerful. They 
had not much mirth, but they had great hilarity. The Old 
Testament is full of cheerfulness, of buoyancy and of 
commands to it. — Henry Ward Beecher. 

Take joy home, 
And make a place in thine own heart for her, 
And give her time to grow and cherish her ! 
Then will she come and often sing to thee 
When thou art working in the furrows ! ay, 
Or weeding in the sacred hour of da-wm. 
It is a comely fashion to be glad — 
Joy is the grace we say to God. 

(62) 



Ill 
Common People at Play 



To everything there is a season and a 
time : a time to weep and a time to 
laugh ; a time to mourn and a time to 
dance." In other words, laughter and amuse- 
ment have just as legitimate a place in life 
as v/eeping and mourning, or as working and 
praying. To laugh with those who laugh 
ought to be as much a part of a man's relig- 
ion as to weep^with those who weep. 

How, then, does it happen that men have 
thought otherwise .? How does it happen that 
even yet we New Englanders have a sneaking 
belief that there is something wicked about 
the man who is really enjoying himself ? That 



64 Common People at Play 

is a part of our inheritance from our Puritan 
ancestors. They bequeathed us many good 
things ; this is one of the bad things that 
they have imposed upon us. There was an 
excuse for the radical position which the 
Puritans assumed. In the time of the Stuarts 
amusement had become synonymous with 
debauchery. The customs of the ''gentle" 
classes, the "refined" people of the day may 
not be described. The most reckless gam- 
bling, drunkenness and licentiousness were 
common. The theater was hideously immoral. 
Many of the plays which were witnessed by 
ladies and gentlemen would not be tolerated 
to-day, even if most carefully expurgated. 
Life was given up to low and filthy pleas- 
ures. 

Against this arose the revolt of the Puri- 
tans. Amusement having so far degenerated, 
these men condemned all amusements. This 
universal condemnation was imported to Amer- 
ica by the Puritans who came to New England. 
Indeed, one reason why they came to America 



Common People at Play 6^ 

was to escape the contamination of old-world 
pleasures. They did not attempt to discrim- 
inate. They condemned. That was a mistake. 
Still let us say, All honor to the Puritans. 
It is better to be pure than it is to be happy. 
It is better to lead a dull life than it is to lead 
an immoral Ufe. 

So much is true. But in protesting against 
wickedness, the Puritans went to the other 
extreme. They came to feel that there was 
something wrong about pleasure in itself. 
The courtiers of England in the time of the 
Puritans had a custom borrowed from the 
Romans called "bear-baiting." It was the 
last relic of the gladiatorial shows. A capt- 
ured bear was annoyed and tortured, very 
much as the Spanish still torture bulls in 
the bull-fight. The Puritans condemned this 
practice, and rightly. But, says Macaulay, 
"The Puritans objected to bear-baiting not 
because it tormented the bear, but because it 
gave pleasure to the spectators." And this 
is the attitude that we have inherited : to 



66 Common People at Flay 

object to any amusement not so much because 
it is bad in itself, as because it gives pleasure 
to the participants. We have intellectually 
outgrown many of the beliefs of the Puritans, 
but the dead hand of those beliefs still 
clutches at our spiritual lives. I hate that 
dead hand. It has hurt the happiness, the 
pure and innocent joy of myriads of God's 
children. It has made little boys and girls 
shiver with fright where they ought to have 
danced with glee. I should be glad to help 
remove the blighting influence of a false 
morality from the life of the world's chil- 
dren — to free some souls from the horror 
of the touch of that dead hand. 

No one can estimate how much pure joy 
the world has lost because of the unhealthy 
religions in which men have believed. It is 
time that we made a new Declaration of 
Independence for ourselves and for our chil- 
dren. It may be that we older persons can 
never be free from the false standards of 
morality which have done much to kill the 



Common People at Play 6y 

natural joy of life ; but our children may be 
free. So let us say, once and for all, that we 
hold this truth to be self-evident : that it is 
right to be happy — happy to the limit — so 
long as our happiness does not make some 
one else miserable. Any game or any form 
of amusement that helps to make people happy 
is good, if it does not make some one or some 
thing unhappy. Men have set up certain false 
standards of morality that ought to be torn 
down. Let us help tear them down. They 
are a blight upon the joyful life of the world. 
When your child comes to you and asks, " Is 
it wrong to play with cards } " say, '' No, it is 
not wrong to play with cards. It is just as 
right as it is to play with jack-straws or to 
play bean-porridge-hot." When he asks, *<Is 
it wrong to play billiards or pool 1 " say frankly, 
" It is just as innocent to roll an ivory ball on 
a green cloth by hitting it with a cue as it is 
to roll a wooden ball on a green lawn by hit- 
ting it with a mallet, and the person who tries 
to make a moral distinction between them is 



68 Common People at Play 

too foolish to heed." When he asks, " Is it 
wrong to dance ? " answer, " Not in the least. 
Dancing may be just as innocent as hop-scotch, 
and the person who tries to make you think it 
wicked is your enemy. Avoid him." When 
your child says, " Is it wrong to go to the 
theater .? " say, " It is as innocent a pastime to 
go to the theater and hear several persons 
recite a good story as it is to sit in a rocking- 
chair at home and hear some member of the 
family read a good story. The right or wrong 
depends altogether upon the story, and the 
person who tries to make you think that the 
one is right and the other wrong is very fool- 
ish, or very intent upon depriving you of inno- 
cent joy. Avoid him." 

There ought to be no doubt that amusement 
is just as essential to life as fresh air and sun- 
shine. Shut a man away from the light of the 
sun and from contact with fresh air, and he 
turns pale and grows sick. He may live, but 
he lives an abnormal life. He becomes a 
monstrosity. Shut a man away from laughter, 



Common People at Play 6g 

song, companionship and good cheer, and his 
soul grows pale and sickly. He becomes a 
spiritual monstrosity. Men and women need 
amusement, they need to laugh, they need to 
dance and play games, they need occasionally 
to get out of themselves and become so inter- 
ested and absorbed in something external that 
they shall forget all the work and worry and 
responsibilities of life. The bow that is always 
bent loses its elasticity. The violin that is 
always strung taut will lose its resonance. 
The man or woman who never relaxes will 
lose even the capacity to work. 

Now let us agree upon a few points. Joy 
is a good thing ; happiness is worth possess- 
ing, here in this world. Strange that so many 
persons should look forward to never-ending 
joy in heaven and should be suspicious of 
thorough enjoyment on earth. If happiness 
is good for the angels, it is good for men. If 
joy is good for heaven, it is good for earth. 
Let us have all the joy we can, now and 
here. 



"/o Common People at Play 

Play, amusement, is one of the ways to 
enjoyment. It is natural for human beings 
to play, right that they should play. More- 
over, the man v/ho knows how to play will be 
able to accomplish the most work. 

It ought not to be necessary for me to 
spend a single moment in saying that life 
should not be given up to play. The person 
who devotes his life to seeking amusement 
defeats his own aim. Charles Lamb, sitting 
on his tall stool and keeping books, longed for 
a life free from toil. "Verily," he cried, '^the 
best thing that a man can do in this w^orld 
is — nothing at all ; just nothing at all." But 
later, when he came into an income which 
released him from the necessity for toil, and 
retired "to do nothing at all," he wrote to his 
friend, " Nov/, when all is holiday, there is no 
holiday." How true that is ! Where all is 
holiday, there is no holiday. There was once 
a little girl who was taken by her parents to 
board at a great, luxurious hotel. One day 
she came to her mother weeping. " I want 



Common People at Flay yi 

to go away from here. I want to go away- 
right off," she cried. '' Why } " said the 
mother, " Is this not a good place .? We 
have beautiful rooms. There is the park for 
you to play in. You have everything you 
want to eat." ''That is just it," wept the 
child. "¥/e have ice-cream every day for 
dinner, and nothing is left to go to a party 
for." To those wealthy and luxurious persons 
who give their lives to pleasure there is noth- 
ing left to anticipate. Life loses its zest. 
Their souls shrivel until they become the size 
of the souls of the butterflies they resemble. 
The man is a fool who makes amusement the 
aim of life. 

Amusement should be such as a person can 
afford. Many people sacrifice too much to 
amusement. They give too much time to 
play, time that should be devoted to study 
and to work. They spend too much money 
upon play, money that should be devoted to 
making home beautiful, or to furthering some 
good cause. The man who will spend three 



7^ Common People at Play 

dollars for theater-tickets on Saturday night, 
and go to church the next day and put five 
cents in the contribution-box, has the facts of 
life out of proportion. 

Amusement which is meant to bring joy to 
one should never give pain to another. The 
savages of Amicrica used to get their fun out 
of tying a victim to a stake and thrusting 
blazing pine splinters into his flesh. The 
savages at West Point get their amusement 
by making their victims swallow tabasco-sauce 
and soap, or by mauling them with their fists. 
There are other savages who find amusement 
in seeing who can slaughter the most pigeons 
with a shot-gun. Savages in Spain and Cuba 
find amusement in torturing bulls to death, 
and in watching these ferocious creatures, 
goaded to frenzy, disembowel helpless and 
blindfolded horses. Other tribes of savages 
gather about a prize-ring and find enjoyment 
seeing two men pound each other into insen- 
sibility. All of this is alike hideous, brutal, 
degrading. Amusement is a good thing, but 



Common People at Play yj 

never, never that kind which causes pain or 
shame to a fellow-man, or to one of God's 
sensitive creatures. 

It will perhaps be expected that I should 
speak, more particularly than I have already, 
about three kinds of amusement to which 
people are addicted, and which have been 
especially condemned in the name of religion. 
There are still churches which insist upon 
denouncing as immoral three kinds of play. 
They designate those who indulge in these 
amusements as sinners. What shall we say 
about the dance, about card-playing, about the 
theater .? 

First, then, as to dancing. Excuse must 
be made for the wholesale denunciation of the 
dance by the church. Dancing has been 
greatly abused. But it remains true that in 
itself there is no more harm in dancing than 
there is in walking; and because it has at 
times been made foul by association is not 
sufficient reason why the church should under- 
take to destroy it. Destroy it ! That is some- 



J 4 Common People at Play 

thing beyond the power of the church. Young 
people have danced ever since men had feet, 
and they will continue to dance as long as feet 
exist. It is as natural for young men and 
women to dance as it is for birds to sing, and 
it would be as sensible to try to stop the 
one as the other. 

If you have a canary that is determined to 
sing, and yet whose song is disagreeable, what 
do you do } You get some other bird, whose 
song is sweet, to teach him to sing as he 
ought. If the church sees that young people 
are determined to dance, and fears lest they 
shall not dance as they should, what shall it 
do ? Take hold of the dance itself and make 
it what it ought to be. There is nothing more 
bea.utiful, more exhilarating, more healthful, 
than a dance. The swaying of the body to 
the rhythm of the music, the beating of the 
feet upon the floor, the symmetrical movement 
of forms among each other — there is a joy 
about it that is indescribable. I imagine that 
the skillful dancer experiences much the same 



Common People at Play 75 

joy as the skillful musician. The body is the 
instrument of the dance, and there is a fas- 
cination in feeling that one has perfect control 
of it. Dancing is an excellent exercise. It 
cultivates the muscles of the body sym- 
metrically. The ease and grace that one 
acquires on the dance-floor follow one every- 
where, and are worth much ; the manners 
that one acquires there will also follow one, 
and one's life will be more courteous for them. 
Above all, the enjoyment that one has had 
there will go with him, and he will be happier 
for his hours of recreation. This is always 
supposing that the dance is conducted as it 
ought to be. 

The dance may be abused, and often is. 
Because I say that dancing is a good and 
wholesome amusement and may safely be 
encouraged is not to say for a moment that 
its abuse ought to be tolerated. That the 
church gives a social supper is no encourage- 
ment of gluttony. When one praises the 
luscious grape he does not give his sanction 



'j6 Common People at Flay 

to drunkenness produced by the juice of the 
grape. Because the church smiles upon the 
dance decently carried on is no sign that she 
gives her approval to the dance when made a 
dissipation. Let us insist that the dance is an 
amusement to be moderately indulged in, and 
that drunkenness and gluttony are no more 
reprehensible than is the dance carried to 
excess. The iadiscriminate dance in which 
any one, whatever his character, may join 
simply for the price of a ticket is an abom- 
ination. The dance after midnight is no 
longer recreation but dissipation. The church 
may smile upon recreation — it ought to frown 
upon dissipation. 

So much for dancing. What about card- 
playing } The only possible charge that can 
be brought against card-playing is that cards 
are associated with evil. "Gamblers use 
cards, therefore no respectable man ought 
to." But I do not think this good reasoning. 
Just as John Wesley could not see why 
the devil should have all the good tunes, I 



Common People at Play // 

cannot see why the devil should have all the 
good games. One great reason why people 
are not attracted toward virtue is that we 
make virtue stupid. We give the young man 
to understand that in order to be virtuous he 
must give up cards and take to authors ; he 
must give up billiards and take to parlor- 
croquet. We make virtue a bore. We let 
the devil have the spice of life. I do not 
beheve in that. " But if young people know 
how to play cards and billiards they will be 
led into temptation." I do not believe that. 
As far as my experience goes, it is the boy 
who knows nothing about cards until some 
blackleg gets hold of him and teaches him to 
play who becomes the gambler. Have the 
games of cards in your home, and let it be 
understood that here is the proper place to 
play. If you can afford it, have a billiard- 
room, and let it be understood that here is 
the place to play billiards, and that no gentle- 
man is ever seen playing billiards — or any- 
thing else — in a saloon. Give your family 



"jS Common People at Play 

the amusement that they crave at home, and, 
trust me, you will keep them there and not 
drive them to the saloons and the gambling- 
dens. 

The next time you have occasion to invite 
one to a game of whist, notice his expression. 
If he is listless and seems half-inclined to 
refuse, I will warrant that upon inquiry you 
will find that he has played cards all his life 
at home, and has become tired of them. If 
he is eager and intensely interested, you will 
discover that he never was allowed as a boy 
to play cards, but now he is fascinated with 
them. Of all the quiet games by which one 
may while away an hour in the evening after 
a day of work, whist is the most interesting. 
Of all the indoor games that serve to rest 
the body and mind and cultivate skillful and 
accurate movement, the game of billiards is 
the best. I can see no reason why to play a 
stupid game of authors is right and to play an 
interesting game of whist is wrong ; why to 
play an awkward game of croquet should be 



Common People at Flay yg 

good and a skillful game of billiards should 
be bad. The only reason for not playing 
these games is that they are associated with 
gambling^ and more or less with drink. But 
so is money associated with gambling. People 
often gamble without cards ; they seldom 
gamble without money. Shall we say, there- 
fore, '' Let us have nothing more to do with 
money " .? Come, let us be reasonable. So 
long as cards are used for recreation and 
amusement, so long they are innocent. But 
the very moment that one gambles, whether 
with cards or the wheel of fortune at a church 
fair, or at the stock-exchange, he is doing 
wrong. Let us place the emphasis where it 
belongs — on gambling — and not on any 
particular game. 

But the same restrictions should be applied 
here that apply to dancing. Be moderate. Do 
not play cards to the detriment of your work 
or your reading. When one spends two or 
three nights a week at the card-table he is 
squandering altogether too much time. When 



8o Common People at Play 

the whist-club begins to absorb more of your 
interest than your home or your business, it 
is time to give up whist. When the game 
gets so fascinating that you play till midnight, 
and then go to bed to toss uneasily till morn- 
ing, you have been dissipating. So long as 
cards are indulged in moderately, for the sake 
of recreation, good. Beyond that, bad. 

Then there is the theater. What attitude 
ought the church to assume toward the 
theater } Ought it to condemn or approve ? 
Neither, unqualifiedly. When the play is 
pure and wholesome, go and enjoy it if you 
can afford the price. When it is vulgar 
and degrading, brings virtue into ridicule, 
or makes the villain a hero, avoid it as you 
would the pestilence. The stage is not alto- 
gether what it ought to be, but is not to be 
entirely condemned on that account. If every- 
thing which falls short of what it ought to 
be should be condemned the church would go 
overboard. The church has tried its best for 
two centuries to overthrow the stage. The 



Common People at Play 8i 

task is too great. The theater is as old as 
the church itself, and will probably exist as 
long. The same human nature that craves 
the one craves the other also. For the church 
and the theater to be at war is for two healthy 
appetites of the human soul to be fighting 
against each other. 

We cannot destroy the theater. There is 
no good reason why we should. Let us then 
seek to make it what it ought to be. There 
is a good deal of talk about the theater as a 
teacher of morality. Some say it will take 
the place of the church, and the preaching 
will by and by be done in parable on the stage. 
I do not believe that for an instant. I do not 
fear the time when the stage will compel me 
to abandon my profession and cry, '* Othello's 
occupation's gone." I do not believe very 
much in the stage as a teacher of morals. 
The theater is a place of amusement. We 
are to go there for recreation. There are 
some plays that I know I am a better man for 
having witnessed, but the most good that I 



82 Common People at Play 

ever got from the theater is rest. The mind 
is withdrawn from its own cares and troubles 
for a while, and interested in something out- 
side itself. So long as that something is 
clean and the mind can rest upon it without 
becoming contaminated, the theater is good 
and its influence is wholesome ; when the play 
has an opposite effect, and you come away 
feeling that you have been handling dirt, 
so that you want to wash your hands, its 
influence is bad. Let the church not be 
foolish enough to condemn the stage whole- 
sale. Let her rather approve that part which 
is clean and good, and condemn that part 
which is dirty and the influence of which is 
bad. 

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole 
matter. Your business is the main thing, 
play subordinate. The work of your life is 
the engine ; the amusements of your life, the 
tender. Play in order that you may work 
better and harder. You can accompHsh more 
in life for occasional recreation. Be sure that 



Common People at Play 8j 

your amusements are clean, wholesome, leave 
a sweet and not a foul taste in the mouth. 
Any amusement which you can afford, that 
gives you pleasure and no other creature pain, 
that carries you into the company of ladies 
and gentlemen, and that rests and recreates 
your body and mind, is good ; otherwise it is 
evil. Observe these rules with regard to 
amusements, and you need have no fear that 
you will get harm from them. 



IV 

Common People at Study 



O for a Booke and a shadie nooke, either in-a-doore ot 

out; 
With the grene leaves whisp'rmg overhede, or the streete- 

cryers all about, 
Where I male Reade all at my ease both of the Newe 

and Olde; 
For a jollie good Booke whereon to looke is better to me 

than Golde. 

I would urge upon every young man, as the beginning 
of his due and wise provision for his household, to obtain 
as soon as he can, by the severest economy, a restricted, 
serviceable, and steadily — however slowly — increasing 
series of books for use through life; making his little 
library, of all the furniture in his room, the most studied 
and decorative piece; every volume having its assigned 
place, like a little statue in its niche, and one of the earliest 
and strictest lessons to the children of the house being 
how to turn the pages of their own literary possessions 
lightly and deliberately, with no chance of tearing or 
dog's-ears. 

If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book 
is worth anything which is not worth mucA ; nor is it ser- 
viceable, until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and 
loved again ; and marked, so that you can refer to the pas- 
sages you want in it, as a soldier can seize the weapon he 
needs in an armory, or a housewife bring the spice she 
needs from her store. Bread of flour is good : but there 
is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book ; 
and the family must be poor indeed which, once in their 
lives, cannot, for such multipliable barley-loaves, pay their 
baker's-bill. — Ruskin. 

(86) 



IV 

Common People at Study 

-^ 

WHAT must I do," asked the younger 
Cato of his father, *'in order to become 
a statesman ? " *' Commit the cyclopedia to 
memory," was the reply. 

That sounds to-day like the wildest kind of 
derision, but it was not so when the answer 
was given. The cyclopedia of the time did 
not contain one-fifth as much material as one 
volume of the " Encyclopedia Britannica." 
But there are twenty-four volumes of the 
"Britannica." Therefore when we speak of 
the cyclopedia we have in mind at least a 
hundred times as much material as did Cato. 
Think of a man trying to commit to memory 



88 Common People at Study 

such a mass of material ! That would be 
beyond the power of even a Jewish scribe, 
many of whom held in their accurate and 
trained memories the whole Old Testament, 
together with the Talmud. 

But even if a man should commit the 
" Britannica " to memory he would not have 
compassed the sum of human knowledge. 
He would be but wetting his feet in the first 
waves of the great ocean of accumulated facts. 
There are special cyclopedias — each having 
to do with only a small branch of knowl- 
edge — almost as large as the " Britannica." 
Ziemssen's " Encyclopedia of Medical Sci- 
ence " comprises seventeen volumes, and there 
are Encyclopedias of Mechanics, Encyclopedias 
of Literature, Encyclopedias of History and 
of Religion nearly as large. 

The time once was when a man might know 
practically everything worth knowing. *' There 
was an old Latin phrase that was used to 
describe a complete scholar : * Qiti tria, qui 
septem^ qui omne scibile novit ' / a man who 



Common People at Study 8g 

knows the three, who knows the seven — in 
short, who knows all that is to be known." 
What was meant by the three ? Grammar, 
logic and rhetoric. These constituted the 
elements of human knowledge. Add to 
these four other items, music, arithmetic, 
geometry and astronomy, and you have 
the sum of human knowledge, "the seven 
liberal arts." Why, there are Vv^hole realms 
of knowledge, unveiled within the last cent- 
ur}^, which are not comprised under any 
of these heads : geology, chemistry, biology, 
anthropology, botany, zoology, and so on 
indefinitely, a subdivision of any one of which 
is enough to occupy a man's study for a life- 
time. 

When Ralph Waldo Emerson entered Har- 
vard College at the age of fourteen he was 
not considered a prodigy of learning. A 
bright boy might easily at that age have 
gained the knov/ledge necessary to fit him for 
entering Harvard. And in the four years 
of the course he could as easily master all 



go Common People at Study 

that the college had to offer. To-day it is 
estimated that if a man should pursue all the 
courses that Harvard College offers it would 
require thirty-six years for him to accomplish 
the task. So great has been the extension of 
learning. 

In this connection try to think for a moment 
of the enormous multiplication of printed 
material. All the printing done in the State 
of Pennsylvania a hundred and fifty years ago 
came from the press of William Bradford, and 
what was produced from this hand-press in a 
year could be thrown off by any one of ten 
thousand modern printing-presses in a single 
hour. New books are poured from the presses 
of Christendom at the rate of twenty-five 
thousand a year. Besides this there are seven 
hundred thousand separate editions of news- 
papers and periodicals printed in English every 
year. One might spend his entire life-time 
in trying to read the products of the printing- 
press in English for a single month, reading 
steadily ten hours a day, including Sundays 



Common People at Study gi 

and holidays, and die an old man before he 
had accomplished the task. There is a story 
of a man who went to the Boston Public 
Library and requested a book. " What book } ' ' 
he was asked. "Any book," he replied, ''I 
mean to read the entire library. I may as 
well commence anywhere." Inasmuch as there 
are four hundred thousand volumes in that 
library, if our reader should get through with 
one volume a day he would have to live to be 
a thousand years old before he completed the 
v/hole, and as new books are being added at the 
rate of some thousands a year, in the end he 
would find a vastly larger library awaiting his 
diligence than the one with which he began. 

The moral to all this is that even if a 
man should give his whole time to study 
he could not hope to compass more than 
a small part of literature. Selection is 
therefore absolutely necessary for every one. 
It is especially necessary for those whose 
time is Hmited, and whose energy must 
largely be spent in the daily occupations of 



g2 Common People at Study 

life. My desire is to help busy people, work- 
ing people, common people, whose lives are 
full of daily toil, and whose leisure is small, 
to occupy to the best advantage the time 
which may be given to study. 

The object of life is not happiness, though 
happiness is one of the means for the attain- 
ment of life's object, as is also unhappiness. 
The object of life is not work nor amusement, 
though, as we have seen, both work and amuse- 
ment are instruments to the attainment of 
life's object. Certainly the object of life is 
not the accumulation of anything, not the 
heaping together of certain shining counters 
we call m.oney, nor the mere accumulation 
of knowledge. The object of life is de- 
velopment. It is quite evident that the 
purpose which has run through this universe 
from the beginning is the production of the 
highest possible type of manhood and woman- 
hood. You are working in a line with the 
divine purpose of the ages when you endeavor 
to make the most of yourself. It is a man's 



Common People at Study gj 

duty to grow. One of the means of growth 
is work ; another, amusement ; a third instru- 
mentahty to the same end is study. It is 
concerning study that I speak. 

The first question, then, and the one which 
we have been approaching so far, is " What ? " 
Out of the vast abundance of material for 
study which the age offers ready at hand, to 
what shall one give his attention ? How shall 
one make his selection ? In the midst of the 
flood of books and periodicals many persons 
stand confused and discouraged. They feel 
that they ought to be doing something regu- 
larly and systematically toward self-culture, 
but they know not where to begin or how to 
proceed; and so they read in a hit-or-miss 
fashion anything that happens to come to 
hand, anything that some friend recommends, 
and the result is that most of the time given 
to study is wasted for the want of method, and 
this in a period when one has little time to 
waste. A few simple rules may be of immeas- 
urable value, 



g4 Common People at Study 

The first 7'iile is that one shottld read along 
the line of Jus especial work. We have insisted 
that every one should have a definite work to 
do in the world for the general benefit and 
enrichment of mankind. But a man's daily 
work is likely to degenerate into drudgery. 
One of the best ways to redeem work from 
drudgery is to enlarge it and glorify it by 
study. Suppose a man is a locomotive- 
engineer. His work in the world is to push 
a lever, pull a bell-rope, oil a bearing, watch 
a steam-gauge, keep his eye along the track 
on the outlook for obstacles or signals. He 
does all this day after day, year in and 
year out. In hot weather and cold he must 
be at his post. The work becomes drudgery. 
But suppose he begins to read along the line 
of his work. He buys or gets from the 
library a book on the construction of the 
engine. It is easy reading for him, though 
it would be hard and dry to most of us, 
because he is familiar with every detail that 
it mentions. He studies the various construe- 



Common People at Study p5 

tions of engines, he becomes interested in the 
whole mechanical problem of the expansion 
of vapor. He begins to grow enthusiastic 
about some particular kind of boiler. Soon 
he wants to know how they build engines in 
other parts of the world, and he must have 
more books. Or if he gets tired of engines 
and machinery, there is the country through 
which he is daily traveling. What are all 
these people who go and come on his train 
doing in the world.? How does it happen 
that they are living in Acton or Concord or 
Cambridge rather than in New Zealand ? So 
he gets a book of history that tells the story 
of the country through which he moves, and 
before he is aware the whole region has been 
redeemed from being so much dirt, grass and 
trees, with here and there a house, to being 
the seat of history. 

Or suppose the man is not an engineer, but 
a physician. We all are apt to glorify the 
business of the other man. Is it possible 
that the physician's occupation can become 



g6 Common People at Study 

drudgery ? Certainly. Think of going through 
this hfe looking at a hundred tongues a day. 
Think of coming in contact with people, and 
expecting, every time you look into a man's 
face, that the owner of it is going to open that 
face and stick his tongue out at you. Think 
of everlastingly giving out the same old pills 
and powders, and saying with a smile, '' Half 
a glass of cold water, with a spoon in it, 
please." How shall a physician save himself 
from becoming thoroughly disgusted with his 
business t how shall he redeem his occupation 
from drudgery 1 Now, of course the physician 
will read the new medical books and journals. 
But here is a book which tells where the con- 
stituents of that pill, which he gives most 
frequently, come from. Peruvian bark ! How 
do we get it ? Who are the people that gather 
it 1 How do they live } What about their 
history ? What a wide channel of interesting 
study is opened ! 

Or suppose that one is a plain, unpretentious 
housekeeper, with meals to get and half a 



Common People at Study gy 

dozen children to care for. What shall she 
read ? There can be no more fascinating line 
of study for any mother than psychology — 
to study the mind of the child. She has the 
children before her as a constant object-lesson. 
The present time is prolific in the production 
of books on the development of the child- 
mind; and they are as interesting as any 
novel. Soon the mother will want to know 
something about Froebel and Pestalozzi. And 
a study of these will in turn open wide ranges 
of research. 

So any one can find reading galore, along 
the line of his especial work in the world. 
Let him make himself familiar with this first 
of all. 

I have said that every one should have a 
vocation and an avocation. If possible, his 
vocation should be something that he loves. 
Often it is something that he dislikes, but 
which he must perform in order to win the 
necessities of life for himself and his family. 
But at least his avocation may be something 



g8 Common People at Study 

that he enjoys, something that he performs 
for the love of it. I know one man who, for 
the pleasure it gives him, works during many 
of his spare moments at book-binding. He 
buys many pamphlets, old books, books in 
cheap covers, and then, with loving touch, he 
puts them in beautiful dress. He finds joy 
in his work. And what an avenue of study 
this opens for him ! With what delight he 
will read everything that comes in his way 
which has to do with the art of book-making, 
the history of printing and binding, the story 
of the great masters of the art. 

I know of a very successful business-man 
whose avocation is entomology. He finds 
his recreation in collecting and arranging 
specimens. A vast field of study is thrown 
open to him here. The literature of this 
department of life is, in our time, almost 
inexhaustible. Or suppose one's vocation is 
that of a carpenter, his avocation music. 
Here is a field of study, provided music is 
a joy to him, that shall be a constant delight. 



Common People at Study gg 

Have an avocatioriy therefore y — some work 
that you do for the simple joy of doing it^ and 
let your reading be along the line of your 
avocation. 

But aside from this reading in the Hne of 
one's vocation or avocation, there are certain 
other directions in which every one ought to 
read, and in which every one may read. The 
books of the world are many, the really great 
books are few. Some years ago an attempt 
was made, by consulting the most eminent 
men of the time, to form a list of the hundred 
greatest books of the world. There was a 
wide difference of opinion as to some books, 
but there was almost universal agreement as 
to many. These books concerning the great- 
ness of which all agree should be familiar to 
every man who aspires to intellectual culture. 

A few years ago I had a friend, a business- 
man with large interests, who might be found 
on the street-car or on the train reading, not 
the newspaper, but some classic of literature. 
He would skim through his paper in five 

L.DfC. 



100 Common People at Study 

minutes and then turn to his book of value. 
He was wont to say that there was one great 
author for every nation : Homer for the 
Greeks, Virgil for the Latins, Dante for the 
Italians, Goethe for the Germans, Cervantes 
for the Spanish, Shakespeare for the English. 
It was his ambition to be familiar with the 
great works of the ages. Therefore, instead 
of thrusting the latest novel into his pocket 
to read on the train, he put there a pocket 
edition of some play of Shakespeare, or a copy 
of Faust. These great books are not so 
numerous that one of even slight leisure may 
not become familiar with them. 

Then, surely, one should know the history 
of his country, and there is little excuse for 
ignorance when such men as Macaulay, Park- 
man and Fiske have by their genius made the 
reading of history a delight. Moreover, every 
one certainly should desire to be familiar with 
such epoch-making books as Darwin's *' Origin 
of Species." But it is not my purpose to 
outline a course of reading. Indeed, I believe 



Common People at Study lOi 

little in a set course. Such an outline may 
be a fetter instead of a help. If one will only 
begin to study, and follow the direction which 
his study points out, he will find enough to fill 
profitably a life-time of leisure. This, then, 
brings me to the second question. 

How? The natural method is the best. 
Commence somewhere, and go in the direc- 
tion that your interest and the necessity of 
study leads you. Suppose that one makes up 
his mind that he will get acquainted with these 
authors of the ages that I have mentioned. 
He need not learn a dozen languages. There 
are excellent translations of all that were not 
written in English. Emerson said that he 
never swam a river if he could find a bridge, 
and never read a book in a foreign language 
if he could get a good translation. I believe 
that a vast amount of time is wasted in getting 
a smattering of foreign languages. 

But, translations aside, suppose you com- 
mence with the classic nearest at hand. 
Shakespeare is in every house. But can one 



102 Common People at Study 

read any play of Shakespeare intelligently 
without reading much besides ? You com- 
mence with Hamlet. You will read Hamlet. 
But wait ! Who was Hamlet ? A prince of 
Denmark. Really, or was he only an imag- 
inary person } Actually, before you have 
begun the play you must run away to the 
library to learn about the royal house of 
Denmark. You started to study a play, — 
your first work is to read history ! Dr. 
Edward Everett Hale, whose magic word is 
"together," suggests the formation of a club. 
Doctor Hale is never happy unless he is form- 
ing a club. This shall be a very small club. 
There shall be no officers or constitution or 
by-laws, and only three members. They start 
to read Shakespeare " together." They will 
read Hamlet. But before they have read the 
first scene of the first act they must know 
more. One shall look up the history of the 
play itself ; when written, when played, in 
what kind of a theater. Another will want 
to know about Hamlet ; was he an historic 



Common People at Study loj 

character ? A third will be interested in 
"Fortinbras of Norway." When they dis- 
perse after the first meeting, each has his 
task. John hurries away to the library to 
hunt for a history. Mary hastens to a friend 
to borrow Taine's English Literature. Peter 
will be found with a volume of the Cyclopedia 
in his lap, studying up Norway. Each will 
have a note-book in which he will jot down 
questions and answers to questions. When 
they meet again all will be filled with infor- 
mation which they are desirous of imparting. 
It is a simple method, but the most effective 
that I know. 

And let me point out that by this method 
one is gaining something more than mere 
information. He is learning to observe. He 
sees illustrations, suggestions, references which 
another passes without knowing they are there. 
He learns to think ; for thought, after all, is 
merely the asking of questions and finding an 
answer to them. And he learns to express 
himself ; for, having found the answer to his 



10^ Common People at Study 

question, he will want to impart his informa- 
tion to another. To observe, to think, to 
know, to express, this is the sum of educa- 
tion. 

Here is another suggestion similar to the 
one already given. Every one should know 
as much of history as possible. Where shall 
he begin } Right here and now, and move 
along the line of his greatest interest. Queen 
Victoria has recently died. Who was she.-^ 
How did she come to be queen at all t What 
right had she, rather than another, to sit upon 
the throne of England } What were the 
principal events of her reign } Edward VH. 
has just become monarch of Great Britain. 
Who was Edward VI., Edward V., Edward I. } 
Before you are through with your inquiry you 
will have read most of the history of Eng- 
land. 

Events of late have been moving very fast 
in China. We ought all to be greatly inter- 
ested in China. Books are being poured from. 
the press, many of them admirable, to answer 



Common People at Study lo^ 

all sorts of questions about the Celestial 
Empire. But why Celestial ? When did it 
begin ? How do the English, French, Russian, 
Germans happen to be in China at all ? Who 
is this empress who is making so much trouble 
at the present moment ? Who are the Boxers ? 
You may easily find answers to these ques- 
tions, and before you have answered them 
others will arise, and you will have ploughed 
your way through much history and literature 
to answer your own interrogations. If in this 
connection you can find one or two other 
people who will move with you along the same 
lines of study your interest will be doubled, 
and by discussion you shall find your informa- 
tion made compact and simple and ready for 
any moment's use. 

In the meantime some good friend whose 
reading consists of the latest novel will find 
you with a book in your hand and ask, '* What 
are you reading?" ''This is a history of 
China," you say. "Gracious me!" cries the 
friend, **how strange that you should be 



io6 Common People at Study 

wasting your time over such stuff as that. 
Have you read * The Master Christian ' ? You 
ought to read * The Master Christian.' " 
Now, do not be ashamed to say, " I have not 
read 'The Master Christian,' and I do not 
intend to." That book is a book of six hun- 
dred pages. It would take you a week to 
read it, and you would get nothing from it. 
In two years it will be as dead as " Robert 
Elsmere." Do not waste your time on books 
that swarm like flies, and are like them also 
in being biggest when they are born. Do not 
be ashamed to confess that there are many 
books, thousands upon thousands of them, 
that you have never read and never intend to 
read. Ralph Waldo Emerson did not read 
as many books in his long life-time as some 
school-girls have read in theirs. He was not 
ashamed to confess that he had not read 
Herbert Spencer's *< First Principles." So do 
not be switched off the track of worthy study 
in order to read the latest novel. 

I am not saying that novels should not be 



Common People at Study loy 

read. The great novels should be familiar to 
you. But the person whose constant diet is 
the novel cultivates a flabby intellect. Read 
a story occasionally, as you would go to the 
theater, — for amusement, and for the cultiva- 
tion of the imagination. Reading a story is 
recreation ; it is not study. Let the bulk of 
your reading be of a kind that furnishes the 
mind with valuable material and cultivates in 
you the power to think. 

But what about the historical novel .? Good, 
if the novel is really historical. We are being 
bombarded just at present with alleged histor- 
ical romances which are the creations of the 
imagination of some one who has not taken 
pains to store his mind with anything but the 
most meager material. " Ye see, Hinnissy," 
says Mr. Dooley, ^* a romance is what happens 
to people ye don't know and can't guess." 
The historical romances of Sir Walter Scott 
are eminently worth studying, because Scott 
was an historian, and he stated nothing in his 
stories that he had not verified by his studies. 



io8 Common People at Study 

His pictures of customs and events are true. 
George Eliot read hundreds of books, ancient 
and modern, before she undertook to write 
" Romola." Read her story and you will get 
a true picture of Savonarola and his times. 
Such books should be studied, for they give 
life to dead ages and characters. But most 
of the ''historical novels" of to-day are "as 
two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of 
chaff ; you shall seek all day ere you find 
them ; and when you have them, they are not 
worth the search." 

And now we come to the final question. 
When ? 

This is a busy world. Our lives are crowded 
full. When shall the ordinary person who has 
work to do in the world, whose business 
absorbs and exhausts his energies, find time 
for study or for much reading } The answer 
is : Save it ; economize it. As a matter of 
fact, the lack of time for serious reading is 
only an excuse which most people give to 
exempt them from the necessity for doing 



Common People at Study log 

anything really worth while. The people who 
make this excuse most frequently are those 
who have the least to do. People who com- 
mand their whole time, who have nothing to 
do and servants to help them do it, are the 
ones most likely to say, " Oh, I am so busy ; 
I haven't time." 

I know that the lives of many people in 
these days are full — full to overflowing. 
But they are largely full of trivialities; full 
of putterings and bustlings ; full of going to 
parties which are a bore, and of the giving 
of parties which are a grind ; full of " PIow- 
do-you-dos" and " Isn't-the-weather-horrids ?" 
full of the taking off of one suit and of putting 
on another, of buttoning and unbuttoning. 
Let us have the courage to empty our lives of 
such trivial things in order that we may fill 
them with something that is worth while. 
The time which most people give to the news- 
paper would be sufficient to make them familiar 
with the best Hterature of the ages. 

Our ancestors worked twelve or fourteen 



no Common People at Study 

hours a day, and yet many of them found time 
to read and to read well. We have more 
leisure than they, but we have largely filled 
this leisure not to our own good but to our 
own hurt. What the world needs at the pres- 
ent moment is greater simplicity of life. Not 
more clubs and lodges, but more evenings at 
home ; not more whist-parties and dances, but 
more quiet hours of communion with the great 
minds of the ages as preserved in the world's 
best literature; not more furniture to dust, 
more cut-glass to worry over, more silks and 
satins to brush and put in drawers and take 
out of drawers ; but more real home-life, where 
there is time to talk and read aloud and 
enter into the enjoyment of an exchange of 
thought. 

Empty your life of frivolities, and let them 
not enter in again, to the end that you may 
know the joy of that companionship of great 
souls made possible to the poorest and the 
humblest through a knowledge of the best 
literature of the world. 



Common People in Politics 



Whoever hesitates to utter that which he thinks the 
highest truth, lest it should be too much in advance of the 
time, may reassure himself by looking at his acts from an 
impersonal point of view. ... He, with all his capacities, 
and aspirations, and beliefs, is not an accident, but a prod- 
uct of the time. He must remember that while he is a de- 
scendant of the past, he is a parent of the future ; and his 
thoughts are as children born to him, which he may not 
carelessly let die. . . . Not as adventitious therefore will 
the wise man regard the faith which is in him. The highest 
truth he sees he will fearlessly utter; knowing that, let 
what may come of it, he is thus playing his right part in 
the world — knowing that if he can effect the change ~he 
aims at — well : if not — well also, though not so well. 

— Herbert Spencer. 

Hail, spirit of revolt, thou spirit of life, 

Child of eternal Love, 

Love rebelling against lovelessness, life rebelling against 
death ! 

Rise at last to the full measure of thy birthright ; 

Spurn the puny weapons of hate and oppression ; 

Fix rather thy calm, burning, protesting eyes on all the 
myriad shams of man, and they will fade away 
in thinnest air; 

Gaze upon the gainsayers until they see and feel the truth 
and love that begat and bore thee. 

Thus and thus only give form and body to thy noble as- 
pirations, 

And we shall see done on earth as in heaven 

God's ever living, growing, ripening will. 

— Ernest Crosby. 

(112) 



V 



Common People in Politics 



ONE of the burning political questions 
among the Jews at the time of Jesus 
had to do with taxation. The Roman empire 
had taken forcible possession of Palestine. 
Governors were appointed, and under these 
was a swarm of tax-gatherers who wrung 
from the hard hands of the people tribute for 
the government at Rome. The Jews hated 
the Romans. They did not want to give of 
their wealth to support the government that 
tyrannized over them. In this fact the Phar- 
isees saw an opportunity to trick Jesus into 
a great difficulty. So they propounded this 
question : " Is it lawful to give tribute unto 



11^ Common People in Politics 

Caesar, or not ? " It was a shrewd question, 
and one which seemed to bear inevitable evil 
consequences to the man who should answer 
it. If he replied, " Yes," he would incur the 
bitter hatred of the Jews, his countrymen. 
If he said, "No," he would lay himself open 
to a charge of treason against the Roman 
power. Jesus escaped from the difficulty by 
laying down, according to his usual method, 
a great and fundamental principle : " Render 
unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's ; and 
unto God the things that are God's." 

That principle holds good for all time. 
Caesar is dead ; the great empire of Rome has 
disappeared ; the principle of Jesus still lives. 
Suppose that the question had been put to 
Jesus in our time instead of in the days of the 
Roman empire. There are plenty of people 
to-day who believe just as little in the taxes 
which they are called upon to pay as the Jews 
believed in the tribute to Caesar. There are 
hundreds of thousands who do not believe in 
the war still being carried on by our govern- 



Common People in Politics ii^ 

ment against the Filipinos. But recently, 
during a period of three years, every time a 
man sent a telegram he was compelled to con- 
tribute the price of two bullets to be fired 
against Filipino soldiers. Every time he sent 
an express-package he was obliged to contrib- 
ute powder enough to send one of these bullets 
into a Filipino's heart. Every time he bought 
a bottle of cologne or a package of medicine 
he made a contribution for the support of a 
standing-army. On certain business-papers 
and in the case of particular manufactures the 
tax still continues. Suppose that Jesus were 
alive to-day, and one should go to him and say, 
" Master, is this stamp-tax just or not ? " If 
Jesus should answer, "Yes," then he would 
incur the enmity of all who do not believe in 
the standing-army and the war in the Philip- 
pines. If he said, " No," he would incur the 
enmity of all those who believe in the policy 
of the government. What would Jesus say } 
"Show me a piece of money." Some one 
places in his hand a cent. " What inscription 



Ii6 Common People in Politics 

is this ? " " The United States of America." 
" Render unto the United States the things 
that belong to the United States ; and to God 
the things that belong to God." Or, to make 
it more general, " Render unto government 
the things that belong to government ; and to 
God the things that belong to God." Here 
you have the principle ; each must apply it for 
himself. 

What is politics 1 The word comes from 
the Greek word polls, which means city. 
Politics means the relation of the individual 
to the community, and of the community to 
the individual. Political duty is the duty which 
each one of us owes to all of us, and all of us 
owe to each one of us. More specifically, it 
has to do with the relation of the citizen to 
the government, and of the government to 
the citizen. Let us consider the duty of the 
individual to the State. 

What, then, is the first duty of the citizen 
toward the State, involved in this fundamental 
principle of Jesus ? 



Common People in Politics 117 

Obviously, the principle involves that a man 
should pay his taxes for the support of govern- 
ment, pay the whole of them, pay them justly, 
pay them cheerfully. Right here we put our 
finger upon one of the besetting sins of the 
present day. No form of dishonesty is more 
prevalent than that of '* tax-dodging." And 
the worst aspect of the situation is that men 
laugh about it, and treat the matter as a huge 
joke. If a man, by a shrewd trick, can get 
his property-valuation cut down so that he 
pays ^500 where he ought to pay ;?iooo, he 
is very likely to call his intimate friends 
together, as did the woman in the parable who 
had found a piece of silver that was lost. He 
makes a supper, and says in a whisper, with a 
self-gratulatory smile, *' Rejoice v/ith me, — I 
have dodged my taxes." Men and women 
who would resent being called dishonest or 
untruthful, and who in the ordinary course of 
their lives are most strict in their integrity, 
do not hesitate to misrepresent their posses- 
sions to the assessor in order to avoid paying 



Ii8 Common People in Politics 

their just proportion of governmental expense. 
Men who are most scrupulous to pay the 
debts which they owe to individuals undertake 
in every way to avoid paying the debts which 
they owe to the State. But when we remem- 
ber that the State is only **all of us," it is 
most difficult to see why it is any less dishon- 
est to avoid paying the debt to " all " than it 
would be to avoid paying a debt to one. 

I saw a party of boys coasting. They all 
enjoyed the slide down the hill on a great, 
heavy, double sled. It was not so much 
pleasure hauling the sled back to the top. I 
noticed that some of the boys, the moment 
the sled reached the bottom of the hill, would 
lay hold on the rope ready to do their share 
of the pulling back. I liked those boys. But 
there were two, who, when the sled stopped, 
began to exercise their ingenuity to avoid the 
burden of the return trip. One pretended 
to have sprained his ankle, and, of course, he 
could not be expected to pull. A second 
became so interested in something at the 



Common People in Politics iig 

bottom of the hill that the sled was half-way 
up before he realized it. Then he had to run 
to catch up. He reached the top just in time 
to select a comfortable place for the ride 
dov/n. Smart } Yes, very. As smart as the 
tricks of some grown men. But, somehow, I 
do not like that kind of a boy. 

What is a tax t It is doing one's share of 
pulling the sled up the hill. There is a road 
to be built. The old-fashioned way, when 
society was primitive, was for every able-bodied 
man in the community to turn out and help 
in the construction of the road which v^ras for 
the benefit of all. When society became more 
complex, it was found inexpedient to work in 
this manner. One would say, " I cannot 
afford the time from my bench, or my loom, 
or my store, or my office, to work on the road. 
I will hire a man to take my place." So "all 
of us " agreed to that method. He is not a 
man worthy of respect who, after a fev/ years, 
not only refuses to do his share of the work 
personally, but tries to avoid paying some one 



120 Common People in Politics 

to take his place in the construction of new 
roads. The money which one pays as a 
tax presumably goes toward doing his share 
of the work in the general improvement of 
the community, building roads, making a 
bridge, constructing a reservoir. Let every 
man do his share by rendering unto Caesar 
the things that are Caesar's. 

The second duty which a man owes to the 
State, that is, which ''one of us " owes to "all 
of us," and which may be deduced from this 
saying of Jesus, is obedience. It is not enough 
for a man to say, in excuse for disobedience, 
that he does not believe in certain laws. His 
indi\ddual opinion does not exempt him from 
the necessity for obedience, unless this law 
directly conflicts with what he conscientiously 
believes to be his duty to God. 

I live in a community where the large 
majority of citizens have decided that the 
liquor-saloon shall not exist. A majority have 
said that the saloon is a nuisance and a menace 
to the best life of the city, and that we will 



Common People in Politics 121 

not have it. So there is a statute banishing 
the saloon and making it unlawful for anyone 
to sell alcoholic liquors. But there are some 
thousands of citizens who do not believe that 
this is a good law. Many think that in ban- 
ishing the saloon the majority have infringed 
upon the personal liberty of the minority. 
Shall this minority say, therefore, "We will 
not abide by this law ; we will evade it in 
every possible way and patronize secret selling 
of liquor " } Nay, the person who does this, 
even though he may be confident that he has 
a right to drink liquor when and where he 
will, is an unworthy citizen. 

Infringement of personal liberty, forsooth ! 
All government is an infringement of personal 
liberty. A man alone by himself in a wilder- 
ness may be a law unto himself. He is per- 
fectly free. The moment he comes from the 
wilderness and places himself in the midst of 
other people, he must submit to limitations of 
his freedom. In the wilderness he may wear 
what clothing he pleases, or none at all. In 



BBB 



122 Common People in Politics 

civilized society he must conform to the customs 
of society. In the wilderness, apart from all 
human beings, he may live in an unsanitary 
dwelling, keep dynamite in his kitchen, set his 
house on fire and burn it to the ground, if he 
will. He is free. The moment he comes 
into the midst of a community of other people 
he must submit to infringements upon his 
freedom. This is the price he pays for the 
privilege of living in society. Therefore let 
a man abide by the laws. If he does not like 
them he is privileged to retreat to the wilder- 
ness; or as a citizen, as "one of us," he is 
privileged to do what he can to change the 
laws by getting *'all of us" to think as he 
does. But in the meantime let him surrender 
his personal rights and abide by the will of ''all 
of us " as expressed in the laws of the land. 

There are many who do not believe in the 
laws of property. They are Communists, and 
believe that no one has a right to private 
possessions. By all means, let them try to 
convert the majority to their views ; but in 



Common People in Politics 12 j 

the meantime let them obey the laws of prop- 
erty. There are many excellent men v/ho do 
not believe in the laws relative to the private 
possession of land. To them the land belongs 
to God, and to society as a whole. By all 
means, let them try to convert the majority 
to their views. In the meantime let them 
surrender their individual rights, as they con- 
ceive them, and obey the laws of the land. 
He only is a worthy citizen who renders unto 
government the obedience which is its due. 

A third duty which the citizen owes to the 
State is to make himself intelligent upon 
social questions. I have spoken about study, 
and emphasized the importance of becoming 
acquainted with the history of the world and 
the best literature of the ages. There is one 
department of study to which every citizen 
ought to give himself, and which is more 
important than either of these. He ought to 
study political and social questions, and be 
ready to give a reason for the opinions he 
holds, for the vote he casts. Conditions are 



12^ Common People in Politics 

radically changed since the time of Jesus. 
In his day the people were one thing, Caesar 
was another. The government was vested in 
an emperor and an aristocracy. The people 
had nothing to say about the making or the 
administration of the lav/s. That belonged to 
Caesar. It mattered little, therefore, whether 
the people were intelligent upon matters of 
government or not. It was important that 
Caesar should be intelligent and just, for the 
sake of the people. It was not important to 
Caesar that the people should be intelligent. 
But we have reversed all that. The people 
are C^sar. The people are the government. 
The ultimate authority of the law is in the 
will of the people. The administration of the 
laws is in the hands of the people. The very 
tribute-money is paid, not by the people to 
some foreign potentate, but by the people to 
themselves for the carrying on of their work. 
So it is important that the people should be 
intelligent upon questions of government, 
because they are the government. 



Common People in Politics 12 j 

What would you think of a king who under- 
took to rule the people and was ignorant of 
the very Constitution under which he ruled ? 
What should we think of a king who took no 
pains to study the social life of his subjects? 
We at once recognize that such a king would 
be unworthy to rule. But we are the king. 
A citizen is unworthy to rule, — that is, he is 
unworthy to cast a vote, — unless he has first 
made an effort to become intelligent upon the 
subject which his vote helps to decide. We 
have somehow got the notion that a democratic 
form of government must be good, because it 
it is democratic. But on the whole I would 
rather be governed by one ignorant and selfish 
sovereign than by a million ignorant and 
selfish sovereigns. A democracy where the 
majority are ignorant may be just as bad as 
an absolute monarchy where the monarch is 
ignorant. 

This is the explanation and the justification 
of the common school system of the Republic. 
So great a man as Herbert Spencer contends 



126 Common People in Politics 

that compulsory education is an encroachment 
upon the authority that belongs to the parent. 
We have no right, he thinks, to say to a man, 
*' You must send your child to school." We 
have no right to tell him to what kind of a 
school he must send his child, or dictate what 
that school shall teach. And yet, I doubt not 
that Mr. Spencer would admit that the people 
have a right to demand intelligence on the 
part of their rulers. It is because the people 
are the rulers in the Republic that we have 
a right to demand education for all. We have 
a right to say that every child shall attend the 
pubhc school, or some school just as good; 
we have a right to dictate that the schools 
shall teach certain things, because we have a 
right to demand intelligence on the part of 
our rulers. 

So the public school exists for the purpose 
of training our kings. We send a child to 
school in order that he may become intelligent 
and learn to think. We supply school-houses, 
school-books, teachers, for the purpose of 



Common People in Politics 12^ 

training boys for citizenship and girls to be- 
come mothers of citizens. 

But suppose the boy, having been trained 
in the schools and taught to think, having 
been watched over and his faculties disciphned, 
refuses when he comes to the age of manhood 
and citizenship to use his knowledge and his 
trained faculties for the good of the State ? 
Such a young man is a cheat. He is defraud- 
ing the State. He takes everything and gives 
nothing. There are thousands of such men 
who give their faculty and their energy simply 
to their own selfish ends, who devote their 
knowledge and their training to the accumula- 
tion of money or to the winning of pleasure. 
There are millions of Republicans who go to 
the polls and vote their party-ticket, and yet 
could give no intelligent reason why they do 
so or make an intelligent statement of the 
principles for which the party stands. There 
are millions of Democrats who know nothing 
about the history of the organization for which 
they vote or the platform which they support. 



128 Common People in Politics 

Here is a man who is a Democrat because his 
father was a Democrat. Here is another who 
votes the Republican ticket because most of 
the men in his " set " vote that ticket. Such 
a person has no moral right to vote at all. 
He only is a worthy citizen who gives himself 
to careful and unbiased consideration of the 
great problems which his vote helps to decide, 
and is able to cry, with Charles Sumner, ^' The 
slave of principle, I call no party master." 

One of the most discouraging features of 
the age in which we live is the disinclination 
of young American citizens to give thoughtful 
and earnest attention to the social problems 
which they will be called upon to decide. 
There never was a time in the history of the 
world when so many political problems of 
great moment were up for consideration as at 
the present. Where are the young men who 
are studying them ? To be sure, President 
Eliot reports that there is a great interest in 
social questions among the undergraduates at 
Harvard. But college men are an insignificant 



Common People in Politics I2g 

minority of the young men of the land. In 
all Cambridge, so far as I know, there is only 
one organization, outside the college, which 
gives serious attention to the discussion of 
social questions, and that is made up of labor- 
ing-men. The laborers are more alive to the 
necessity of right opinions on social questions 
than any other class. You may hear more 
intelligent discussion of political problems at 
the Labor Unions than anywhere else outside 
the college lecture-rooms. The old-fashioned 
debating-club is dead. The lyceum has degen- 
erated into a variety show. Men are interested 
in private clubs, bowling, billiards and foot-ball. 
Where are the men who are supremely inter- 
ested in the problems of society t Wake up, 
young men ! Within the next twenty-five 
years questions will come up for your decision 
that will bear upon the whole future life of 
the Republic, and so of the world. Yea, such 
questions are already here. Every worthy 
citizen will make all sacrifice of ease and 
pleasure to become intelligent upon pohtical 



ijo Common People in Politics 

questions which his vote must hope to 
decide. 

A fourth duty which the citizen owes to 
the State is expressed in the word patriotism. 
He owes his country his love. Now, when 
we begin to talk about patriotism we are 
likely immediately to think of swords and 
rifles, waving flags and gattling-guns. What 
is a patriot } A man who lies behind a breast- 
work and undertakes to shoot some other man 
to death ? A man who charges up a hill and 
perhaps lies down and dies on the slope .? 
No, that is not patriotism. That may be one 
of the manifestations of patriotism, or it may 
be only a manifestation of bull-dog ferocity, 
of brutal and degrading lust for a fight. 
There are men who go drifting around the 
world looking for a fight. This month you 
will find such men fighting in South Africa ; 
it makes little difference to them whether 
they are on the side of the British or of the 
Boers. They would like to be on the winning 
side, but the main thing is to fight. Next 



Common People in Politics iji 

month you may find the same men fighting 
in China. The merits of the question do not 
trouble them. They Hke to fight. It is a 
degradation of the word to call such men 
patriots. As well call a bloodhound a patriot. 
To love one's country, to be ready in emergency 
to die for one's country, to be ready above all 
to live for one's country, — that is patriotism. 

There are those who would have us believe 
that if war should be abolished patriotism and 
heroism would cease. Nothing of the kind 
would happen. With the abolition of war we 
should enter upon a saner idea of patriotism. 
We should be able to see that the men who 
build the railroads for the glory of their coun- 
try, the men who clear the wilderness and 
make it blossom like the rose, the men who 
till the soil so that their fellows may be fed, 
the scholars who study the needs of the hour, 
the teachers who guide the minds of the 
young, — all these are the true patriots and 
are giving their Hves for the welfare of their 
country. 



IJ2 Common People in Politics 

It is time also for us to understand that it 
is not necessary, in order that a man may love 
his country, that he should hate some other 
country. Must I, in order to love Massachu- 
setts, hate New York ? Must I, in order to 
love America, hate Spain ? The largest and 
best patriotism is that which will lead a man 
to say, " The world is my country ; all human- 
ity are my fellow-men." I can best serve 
humanity by serving the State in which I was 
born and where I live. But it is just as selfish 
and just as contemptible for a man to plan for 
the enrichment of his own country at the 
expense of another man's country as it is for 
him to plan for his own enrichment at the 
expense of his neighbor. " Thou hast heard 
that it has been said," translates Tolstoi, 
"Thou shalt love thy countryman and hate 
a foreigner ; but I say unto you. Love foreign- 
ers, and pray for them that persecute you, 
that you may be children of your Father 
who is in heaven." 

"I am a man," said Terence, "and nothing 



Common People in Politics /jj 

human is foreign to me." Noble statement ! 
Let us not reverse it and say, '' I am an Amer- 
ican, and nothing foreign is human to me." 

Again, it is the duty of the citizen to 
express his opinion as to the government 
under which he lives, if he has an opinion to 
express. There is a power in public opinion 
even where the expression of it is discouraged. 
It was so powerful in Palestine at the time of 
Jesus that the great Cassar himself did not 
care to brave it. Public opinion in our day 
is powerful to influence such unlimited mon- 
archies as Russia and China. But with us 
here in America public opinion is the supreme 
force. We provide a method for the expres- 
sion of this opinion. This method is the 
ballot. The policy of our government being 
determined by pubUc opinion, and each citizen 
being a part of the public, it becomes the 
duty of each first to have an opinion and then 
to express it. The man who can vote and 
who does not vote ought to be banished to 
Russia or to China where such opportunity is 



/j^ Common People in Politics 

not given to the citizen. Our forefathers 
fought, suffered, sacrificed, died, that you and 
I might have the right to express our opinion 
through the ballot. Shame to the man who 
refuses to sacrifice an hour from his business 
or his pleasure in order that he may exercise 
the privilege to gain which his ancestors 
willingly laid down their lives. 

c^But the mere casting of a ballot is not the 
whole duty of the citizen. Every true citizen 
will be an agitator. What he believes he will 
try to make others believe. We hear many 
sneers and much condemnation against agita- 
tors. But if you look back and pick out the 
men whose names we most love to honor, you 
will discover that they were agitators. Samuel 
Adams and Patrick Henry were agitators.. 
Phillips and Garrison and Sumner and Whittier 
were agitators. Yea, to go back into ancient 
history, you will recall that the inhabitants of 
Thessalonica cried concerning the great apostle 
Paul and his faithful disciples, ''These that 
have turned the world upside down are come 



Common People in Politics /J5 

hither also." Every man who beheves any- 
thing should agitate until he has been proved 
wrong or until his truth has been accepted. 
That is a man's simple duty. 

And the final duty of the citizen of which 
I shall speak is, on occasion, to break the 
laws, resist the government, defy authority ! 
I have said that it is the citizen's duty to obey. 
Ordinarily that is true, even to the sacrifice 
of his personal rights and opinions. But there 
may come a time when it is his duty to dis- 
obey. There is a higher law — the law of 
Righteousness. " Render under God the 
things that are God's," said Jesus. There 
was once a man named Daniel, who lived in 
a State where there was a law against praying 
to Daniel's God. He threw his window open, 
toward Jerusalem, and prayed so that all might 
hear, and braved the consequences. All honor 
to Daniel ! There was once a law which 
declared that every ounce of tea used by the 
American colonists should pay a tax to a for- 
eign power. The colonists made a tea-pot of 



1^6 Common People in Politics 

Boston harbor. They broke the law. All 
honor to the colonists ! There was once a 
law that said if any Negro slave escaped from 
bondage every citizen of a free State was under 
obligation to hunt him down and return him 
to his owner. And there were men who not 
only broke this law but broke the doors of 
jails where Negroes were confined and aided 
them to escape. All honor to Parker and 
Garrison and Higginson for refusing obedi- 
ence and breaking the law ! 

The time may come in your life or mine 
when our duty to Right, to the high law of 
God, may demand of us that we disobey and 
even forcibly resist the laws of the State. 
When that day comes there ought to be no 
h':'<=iitation on our part. But there should 
always be a noble motive. Let him who 
breaks the law of the land do so only in 
obedience to the higher law of eternal jus- 
tice and divine righteousness. ** Render unto 
Caesar the things that are Caesar's, but to 
God the things that are God'So" 



A 



VI 

Common People at Church 



I am glad to believe, and I do believe, that the idolater, 
kneeling in blind hope or stupid terror at the feet of his 
hideous or fantastic idol, is as truly religious as the Ro- 
manist hushed and awed at the Elevation of the Host, or 
as the Liberal passionately moved by the splendid utter- 
ance of the great divine truth of the Fatherhood of God. 
I can imagine myself kneeling, in a great temple of Buddha 
in Japan, or in the magnificent mosque of St. Sofia, by the 
side of the Buddhist or the Moslem, sure that my prayer 
and theirs reach the listening ear of the one Father who is 
in Heaven, and that God answers us both. 

— E. Winchester Donald. 

Christianity is not exclusive. It teaches that in every 
nation he that findeth God and hath righteousness is 
accepted of him. A Christian man is simply a man in 
his highest condition as a moral and spiritual being; the 
Chiistian Church is simply human society transformed by 
the spirit of Christ; and the Christian rehgion, taken in 
its principle, and apart from the special cults which have 
grown up in connection with it, is not so much the sole as 
the highest mode of approach to God. We vindicate for 
it not exclusiveness but supremacy. 

— W. H. Freemantle. 
(138) 



VI 

Common People at Church 

I AM to speak concerning the church.* I 
wish to say some things about what the 
church has been, what it is, what we vv^ould 
hke to see it become, and our relationship 
to it. 

It will help us, first of all, to get an historical 
view ; to look at the origin of this institution. 
Most people, I think, believe that Jesus him- 
self organized the church, and if we could 
ascertain accurately the forms that he ordained 



* The authority for statements about the origin of the 
church made in this address may be found in the " Life 
and Letters of Paul," by Lyman Abbott, D.D., — especially 
the chapter upon " The Early Church," — and in the list of 
books there given. 



/^o Common People at Church 

there would be an end of all dispute concern- 
ing Episcopacy, Presbyterianism and Congre- 
gationalism. The truth of the matter is that 
Jesus organized no church. The word trans- 
lated cJiurch in our New Testament was used 
by Jesus only twice, and in neither case in the 
m.odern sense. Jesus described himself as a 
sower, one who scattered his seed careless as 
to where it should fall. Some bore much 
fruit, some bore little, and some none at all. 
His business was to scatter the seed. The 
nearest that Jesus ever came to anything like 
organization was to choose twelve men to be 
his disciples, and send them forth to teach 
Vv^hat they had learned from him. At one 
time he sent seventy in pairs to preach, but 
that appeared to be a temporary expedient, 
and fell to pieces almost instantly. The word 
for church that he used, the word used 
all through the New Testament writings, is 
ekklesia, hence our word ecclesiastic, and it 
means simply "those called out," or those 
assembled by a call. It was a custom in those 



Common People at Church 141 

days, as it was in the early times of New 
England, to summon people to assemble by 
calling to them. We even now use the 
phraseology of the past, and speak of " calling 
a meeting." The town-crier is still an institu- 
tion of Nantucket, and when there is to be a 
town-meeting he calls the people out by walk- 
ing through the village and shouting a sum- 
mons. This was a universal custom in the 
times of the early Christianity. There were 
no newspapers, no telegraphs, no telephones. 
Of necessity if people were to be brought 
together it must be by some such method. 
They were called out, — ekkaleo. And those 
who assembled were the ekklesia, the called 
out. 

Now, a man who sees a truth and utters it 
publicly will by that act call certain persons 
about him. When Phillips began to preach 
the anti-slavery doctrine, some of those who 
heard him believed. Whenever he spoke near 
Boston one was likely to see the same com- 
pany of believers. They constituted his per- 



1^2 Common People at Church 

manent audience. They were especially those 
that he had called out. So with Jesus. Thou- 
sands heard him, hundreds were attracted by 
him, but tens began to attach themselves to 
him. They were his permanent audience in 
the midst of a shifting multitude. They were 
especially the called out, the ekklesiuy — the 
church. 

But these people were entirely unorganized, 
and Jesus made no attempt to organize them. 
After the death of the great teacher his apos- 
tles naturally took his place as teachers and 
guides. People began to attach themselves 
to the handful of believers that remained in 
Jerusalem. They expected that Jesus was 
shortly to return to earth and establish him- 
self as ruler of the world. Property was of 
little worth, because it would soon lose its 
value. It was not worth while to accumulate 
and save when perhaps to-morrow, or at least 
next week or next month, the end of the 
world would come. So all the believers 
brought their property, and put it into a 



Common People at Church i^j 

common fund, and the apostles portioned it 
out day by day. Soon the leaders discovered 
that they were spending too much time dis- 
tributing food, or, as they said, waiting on 
tables. That seemed to them a great waste 
of energy. Others could do that. So they 
chose certain men to distribute food, and to 
do other necessary work. These men were 
called diakonoi, waiters, ministers, — that is 
what the word means. That was after the 
choice of the twelve apostles, the second step 
in organizing the church. 

But Christ did not come. The believers 
became scattered by persecution. They went 
here, there, everywhere, and wherever they 
went they carried something of Christ's teach- 
ing. About these scattered Christians other 
assemblies grew, other people were called, 
other churches were loosely formed. Then 
came that wonderful man, Paul of Tarsus, 
who, having been converted to Christianity, 
became the apostle to the Gentiles, and with 
restless spirit and exhaust less energy went 



1^4 Common People at Church 

from city to city and nation to nation, calling 
together those who had heard of Christ, and 
preaching the good news to those who had 
never heard. Wherever he went he called 
about him companies of people ; and, having 
spoken his word, he would pass on to the 
next town, and would, by-and-by, send a letter 
back to the church, that is those who had been 
'^ called together," at Galatia or Ephesus, or 
who had assembled at Corinth. Of course, 
these people at first had no church buildings. 
They met for the most part in private houses, 
sometimes in a school-house, occasionally in a 
public hall. It was Paul's custom, when he 
came to a new city, to go to the Jewish syn- 
agogue. He was a Jew, a rabbi indeed, and 
had the right, possessed by every Jew, of 
speaking in the synagogue. He availed him- 
self of this right, and preached Christ to the 
Jews first of all. Sometimes it happened 
that so many of the Jews would be converted 
that the synagogue would become a Christian 
assembling-place, or a church. The synagogue 



Common People at Church 7^5 

is the mother of our church buildings. But 
these were not the only churches. Sometimes 
the church would be a very strange building. 
The catacombs in Rome are a church. The 
great amphitheater is a church. 

But of course there must inevitably grow 
up some kind of organization in any assembly. 
Suppose Paul goes to Philippi, or Caesarea, or 
Galatia, and founds a church, that is calls 
together a company of people who accept his 
teaching, and then goes away. The people 
continue to come together after he is gone. 
He has told them to do that, not to neglect 
assembling themselves together. But who is 
to conduct the meeting } If these people are 
Jews the matter is easily determined. The 
Jews reverence age. The elder in the assem- 
bly always has the greatest authority. Thus 
the elders, the presbuteroi^ — whence our word 
Presbyterian, — took charge of the assembly. 
The meetings were not like our church serv- 
ices. They were more like prayer-meetings. 
Any one spoke. They sang a good deal. 



1^6 Common People at Church 

They read and discussed the Old Testament, 
and, when the gospels and epistles came into ex- 
istence, they Hstened to and discussed these. 

Now it was inevitable that, of these men 
who assumed authority in the early assemblies, 
because of age, prestige or personal popularity, 
one man would be recognized as possessing 
especial power and ability. There would arise 
a great many small questions that some one 
would have to decide. A man is going to 
move from the assembly at Galatia to the 
assembly at Phrygia. Shall he have a recom- 
mendation to Christians in that country } If 
so, who shall write it .'' A man comes to 
Galatia from Ephesus. He says he is a Chris- 
tian, and wants to be taken into fellowship, 
and fed and clothed. Some one must decide 
whether he shall be or not. Who } Why, 
this man of especial authority by virtue of his 
recognized ability. What shall we call him 1 
We will call him the superintendent of the 
assembly, the overseer, that is the bishop, the 
episkopos, — whence our word Episcopalian. 



mtm 



Common People at Church /^7 

So, without following the subject too far, 
you see how naturally the church came into 
existence and the organization grew. 

Suppose a person wished to join one of 
these assemblies of Christians, how was this 
brought about ? Did he sign a creed ? There 
was no creed to sign. Do you suppose the 
elder cross-questioned him, and asked, *'Do 
you accept the Bible as supreme and infallible 
authority } Do you subscribe to the doctrine 
of the Trinity } Do you believe in predestina- 
tion } " There is not the least reason to sup- 
pose that subscription to such doctrines was 
required. All this was an after-growth. What 
was the formula ? ''I believe on the Lord 
Jesus Christ." That was all, and that was 
enough. 

Were such people baptized t Undoubtedly. 
What did that mean t Purification. Water 
always means that. You say, " I wash my 
hands of the whole matter." A man joining 
any assembly of Christians said, by symbol, 
" I wash myself of the stains of my past life, 



i/fS Common People at Church 

and here I commence anew to lead a clean 
life." 

Were such persons baptized by a bishop ? 
Generally, I presume, but indeed any Chris- 
tian could baptize another. No one dreamed 
till centuries later that this was the peculiar 
function of bishops. Were they baptized by 
immersion, or by sprinkling ? Probably water 
was poured on the head from a vase. That 
matters nothing, however. The act of bap- 
tism was only a symbolic way of saying, " I 
am determined to lead a pure life." 

Every one has read " Quo Vadis." Un- 
doubtedly the book gives a very good picture 
of society in Rome at the beginning of our 
era, but the picture it paints of the early 
church is contrary to all the facts ascertained 
by accurate historical research. You get the 
idea that Jesus had appointed Peter to be the 
head of the church, that Peter went to Rome 
and organized the Christians there, and became 
the first bishop of Rome, — that is, the first 
pope ; that Paul was Peter's right-hand man, 



Bl 



Common People at Church i^g 

referred everything to Peter, and took his 
orders from Peter. You would suppose that 
the church was organized from the top toward 
the bottom, first Jesus, then Peter, then Paul 
and the bishops, then the other officers, and 
so down to the people. This is contrary to 
fact. The church really grew as a plant. 
First the truth as it was in Jesus ; then people 
attracted by this truth and forming an assem- 
bly, a church ; then officers, elders, — that is, 
presbyters ; workers, — that is, deacons ; over- 
seers, — that is, bishops. First the singing 
of hymns, a prayer-meeting without any set 
form, a social supper, a simple symbol of 
purification ; from that a form of service, then 
a ritual, robes, consecrated buildings, and 
ecclesiastical machinery revolving about the 
sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper, 
and holding up an elaborate creed. 

In the course, jof centuries, you must see 
that it was inevitable that the church should 
take on various forms of organization accord- 
ing to the temperament and education of the 



i£o Common People at Church 

people thus organized. What so natural as 
that the church of Rome, origmating under an 
absolute monarchy, where the people were 
accustomed to be ruled in civic affairs by an 
emperor whose will was that of God, should 
take on the form also of an absolute monarchy ; 
that its head should be one man whose will 
was supreme ? The church of Rome is the abso- 
lute monarchy in religion, with all the trappings 
and machinery of such a monarchy. But what 
more natural, when the spirit of independence 
began to spread, than that there should be a 
revolt against the monarchical rule of priests, 
and that, with the growth of republican ideas 
in government, republican ideas in religion 
should also grow, until at the opposite extreme 
from the church of Rome we have the con- 
gregational form of church government, which 
is purely democratic } In the church of Rome, 
the pope and the bishops determine everything. 
In the Congregational church, the people deter- 
mine everything. The assembly of the people 
choose the officers, frame the creed, if any, 



Common People at Church i^i 

elect the pastor, and there is no authority that 
can say them nay. If the people in a Con- 
gregational church in Somerville do not like 
the way in which the people of a Congrega- 
tional church in Boston conduct their affairs, 
do not like the creed, or the form of worship, 
or anything else — - well, they need not have 
anything to do with the Congregational church 
of Boston. They can refuse to fellowship 
that church, that is all. This, you see, is pure 
democracy. The mode of government of the 
Universalist church is congregational, as is 
also that of the Unitarian and the Baptist. 

But there are people who do not like either 
an absolute monarchy or a pure democracy in 
government or religion. It is perfectly natural, 
therefore, that the two extreme forms should 
shade into each other. The church of Rome 
is an absolute monarchy ; the Episcopal church 
is a limited monarchy ; the Presbyterian church 
is still more democratic ; the Methodist church 
still more so, until one reaches the extreme 
democracy of Congregationalism. 



1^2 Common People at Church 

Then, of course, there must arise not only 
difference of opinion as to organization, but 
differences as to doctrine. It is no more to 
be expected that all Christians will think alike 
as to religion than that all Americans will 
think alike as to politics. And in truth the 
one would be just as little desirable as the 
other. There are a hundred and fifty differ- 
ent sects of Christians in this country. This 
is considered a reproach. But I venture to 
affirm, if accurate account could be taken, that 
there would be found as many different polit- 
ical organizations, and this is considered most 
natural. There are, as we learned in the last 
presidential campaign, many different schools 
of Democrats. There are as many different 
sects of Republicans. There are a dozen 
kinds of Socialists, and so on. There are a 
great many sneers indulged in about the divis- 
ion of Christendom into sects. A Jewish 
rabbi said the other day, " I am often invited 
to become a Christian, but what kind of a 
Christian shall I become } When you deter- 



wak 



Common People at Church i^j 

mine that among you, I will take the matter 
into consideration ! " That was shrewd, but 
not fair. There is as much difference between 
the various kinds of Jews as there is between 
Christians, but this rabbi, with his broad spirit 
and generous thought, considers this one of 
the glories of Judaism. Why should not the 
same thing be one of the glories of Chris- 
tianity } 

I was accustomed at one time to go to a 
very wealthy man to solicit funds for benevolent 
and church purposes. He generally put me 
off by saying, '' Go and unite your sects, and 
I will help the united church." But I noticed 
that when he was asked to contribute to his 
political sect he did not say, '^ Go and unite 
your political parties, and I will support the 
union." 

There is no more reason why all differences 
of opinion as to religion should be surrendered, 
or all varying forms of worship be merged 
into one, or all forms of government in church 
be unified, than that all the various corps of a 



i^^ Common People at Church 

national army should be uniformed alike or 
disciplined alike. There must be infantry and 
cavalry, and artillery and marines, the signal- 
corps and the commissary department, and I 
know not what all. One man loves the 
infantry, another the cavalry, another the 
artillery. The only just point of criticism is 
not the differences of drill or dress, but differ- 
ences of courage and usefulness. Do they 
fight well against a common enemy } It is 
said that each soldier of the British army 
wears on the lapel of his coat the mark indicat- 
ing the company to which he belongs. But, 
when the battle is on, the lapel is turned up, 
and each man becomes simply a soldier of the 
empire. 

So with the church. Any man may well 
be proud to wear the mark indicating to 
which particular company he belongs, if only, 
when the battle is pitched, distinction disap- 
pears, and all make a common fight against 
injustice and cruelty and sensuality and sin. 
Suppose this country should, for just cause, 



Common People at Church 755 

go to war with Germany or France or Eng- 
land, — which God forbid, — and some man 
should give, as an excuse for not enlisting, 
that there are so many different companies 
that he could not choose which to join ? You 
would say, " Fool ! if you really have no 
choice, if your whole heart is not centered on 
becoming a member of the infantry or the 
cavalry or the marine service, then join the 
company that is nearest, and go and do your 
duty. The main thing is that you do your 
duty." 

So when people say to me, '' I would will- 
ingly put myself on the side of the church, 
but I can't determine what church to join, 
there are so many," I say, "If your whole 
heart is not enhsted in one particular church, 
then, as you love God, put yourself into the 
church that is nearest, and go to work. The 
main thing is that you put yourself somewhere, 
and join the general struggle for the better- 
ment of the world." 

But why should a man be asked to put him- 



1^6 Common People at Church 

self in the church, to identify himself with any 
church, to join the church ? For exactly the 
same reason that men in those early days of 
the church did v/ell to identify themselves with 
the life and work of the assembly. Suppose 
the people to whom Paul went and preached 
had said, '' Oh, yes, we accept in general the 
principles that you teach, but we see no reason 
for identifying ourselves with your movement 
in any way." Suppose that had been the 
universal attitude. There would have been 
no church, and the world would be infinitely 
poorer than it is to-day. Suppose people say 
to-day, " Oh, yes, we accept in general the 
principles for which the Christian church 
stands, but we see no reason for identifying 
ourselves with the institution." Well, there 
will be no church to-morrow if that is the 
attitude of all. 

I am convinced that the church is in a most 
critical period of its history. The church 
used to be the center. As a matter of course, 
here in New England at any rate, every one 



Common People at Church i^y 

went to church, and most people joined the 
church and put themselves actively on its 
side. To-day the drift is decidedly away from 
the church. There are scores of families in 
every community, not a single member of 
which ever goes inside of a church. It used 
to be considered something of a reproach for 
a man never to attend church. To-day a min- 
ister is continually meeting men, and often 
women, who say, as if it were a huge joke, 
"I haven't been to church for ten years." 
But that is no joke. When the people desert 
the church the church must die. I have tried 
to show that, by the historical sketch which 
has been given. The people are the church. 
The church is not something divorced from 
the life of the people. It is the people or 
nothing. Now, frankly, are you ready to say, 
" Well, let the churches go ; we have no 
further use for them " .? No, you are not 
ready to say that. If the pastors and deacons 
and members of the churches in a com- 
munity should come together and agree to 



1^8 Common People at Church 

close all churches, to sell them for libraries 
and music-halls and factories, a mighty shout 
of indignation would go up from the very 
people who go to church once in a year, or 
once in ten. We are not ready to let the 
church go. People knov/ its value ; they know 
that it stands for the best moral life of the com- 
munity. They know it stands for the under 
man, and reaches out its hand to help the 
fellow who is down. They know it stands 
for law, and against lawlessness. They know 
it stands for temperance and sobriety, and 
against sensuality. They know it stands for 
enlightenment, and not for ignorance. They 
know it stands for kindness, and not for 
cruelty. There is not a man in any com- 
munity, be he never so bitter against the 
church, who in his heart of hearts would not 
be afraid to have the churches closed, lest we 
should all go down into the darkness of 
sensuality and ignorance together. The very 
men who are absorbed in mere money-getting 
know the value of the church to a commun- 



Common People at Church i^g 

ity. '*How much was real-estate worth in 
Sodom ? " 

Then, if you would not lose the church, 
why not stand for it ? You know that the 
"lodge" cannot stand unless people identify 
themselves with it. You know that the polit- 
ical party cannot stand unless people identify 
themselves with it. Why should any sane 
man think that the church is going to stand 
indefinitely, if the people do not put their 
lives into it } 

I am speaking frankly. More and more the 
common people are deserting the churches. 
The vast Sunday procession of trains, elec- 
tric-cars, carriages and bicycles is constantly 
increasing. Well, if that is the kind of 
thing you v/ant, join the procession. If 
you want a holiday once in seven, a day 
of universal picnicking and jollification, base- 
ball, golf, open theatres, open saloons, and 
closed churches, put yourselves on that side. 
You can have that without much exertion. 
The man is blind who does not see that the 



i6o Common People at Church 

tendency is that way. I noticed, in an account 
of a meeting of the directors of the National 
Base Ball League, that the Boston team is the 
only one that does not play on Sunday, and 
Boston the only place where Sunday games 
are not held. All other communities have 
surrendered to Sunday base-ball. Occasion- 
ally we have, even in Boston, under the thin 
disguise of a "sacred concert," the open 
theater on Sunday night, with variety and 
minstrel shows. But it is not so bad as 
it is in Chicago, where, for instance. Doctor 
Thomas preaches to an audience in a theater 
at eleven o'clock, while hardly has he pro- 
nounced the benediction when men rush on 
the stage to drag off the pulpit and make 
ready for the afternoon rehearsal for the play 
to be presented in the evening. A friend of 
mine had the theater audiences in Chicago 
counted one Sunday night. There were thirty 
thousand people attending. Every theater 
packed, and not a church opened in the entire 
district ! Why t Well, it is useless to open 



Common People at Church i6i 

a church when no one cares to come, and 
for one I would rather close the church for- 
ever, and nail up the door, than to conduct 
a variety-show in it under the name of relig- 
ion, to run opposition to the open theater. If 
the people want the theater, let them go to 
the theater and get what they want, and 
pay for what they get, and not go to the 
church and get the theater under the name 
of a service of worship. This is the con- 
dition of things in Chicago and most other 
western cities. How long will it be, if the 
present tendency prevails, before the same 
order obtains in Boston .? 

Are we ready for that 1 Are we ready for 
the open saloon, the open theater, open beer- 
gardens, and the closed church .? Are we 
ready for living vice, living greed, living injus- 
tice, a living race after the almighty dollar, 
and in the midst of it all the one thing dying, 
the Christian church .? If you are not ready 
for that, then in the name of reason put your- 
self on the side of the church, and not on 



i62 Common People at Church 

the other side ; work for the church, and not 
against it. 

" But the church is not doing its full duty ! " 
Come and help it do its full duty. You have 
no business to stand outside and criticise. 
Come and help do the work. " But the church 
is not what it ought to be ! " Come and make 
it what it ought to be. I have told you that 
the church had its origin in the people. It is 
a democratic institution. You, the people, 
can make it what it ought to be, if 3^ou will. 
Our national government is not all it ought to 
be. You, the citizens, are ultimately respon- 
sible. If it is not all that it ought to be the 
fault is yours, and you have not the least right 
to complain until you have wrought with all 
your heart and soul as a citizen for the purifi- 
cation of government. So you are ultimately 
responsible for what the church is. Until you 
have done your utmost to make the church an 
ideal institution, you have not a vestige of 
right to complain, or even to criticise. 

I feel the responsibility that rests upon us 



Common People at Church i6j 

to-day. I believe that we are passing through 
a critical period of American history. Within 
the next twenty years the most tremendous 
moral questions are going to be thought out, 
perhaps fought out. In a time like this, if 
ever, the world needs the Christian church to 
stand in the midst of all the tumult and hate 
and sin and strife, to stand, perhaps, in the 
midst of institutions going to wreck, to stand 
for justice, for equity, for law, for love. 
Come, you men in whose veins flows the 
blood of the forefathers of New England; 
come, you women, daughters of God-fearing, 
God-worshiping mothers; come, you young 
men and young women upon whose brows 
shines already the light of the coming era; 
come, and let us make the church such an 
institution as the present age demands ! 



VII 
Common People as Neighbors 



Despise not any man that lives, 
Alien or neighbor, near or far; 
Go out beneath the scornful stars 
And see how very small you are. 
The world is large, and space is high 
That sweeps around our little ken ; 
But there's no space or time to spare 
In which to hate our fellow-men. 

— Sam Walter Foss. 

Wherever in the world I am, 

In whatsoe'er estate, 
I have a fellowship with hearts 

To keep and cultivate ; 
A work of lowly love to do 

For them on whom I wait. 

I seek, then, for a thoughtful love, 
Through constant watching wise 

To meet the glad with joyful smiles 
And Vv'ipe the weeping eyes ; 

A heart at leisure from itself 
To soothe and sympathize. 

— Anna L. Warmg. 
(i66) 



VII 

Common People as Neighbors 



ONE of the paradoxes of modern society 
is that as men live nearer together they 
draw farther apart. Some one remarked to a 
gentleman occupying a flat in an apartment- 
house that it must be very pleasant to live 
in that way ; that those residing in the build- 
ing must be like a great family ; that there 
must be much social life and friendly inter- 
course. But he was assured that quite the 
contrary was true. **For," said the gen- 
tleman living in the apartment-house, "those 
that are above us are below us, and those that 
are below us are above us." That is, as 
people cease to be separated by space they 



1 68 Common People as Neighbors 

become separated by walls of social distinc- 
tion. 

We think of the ancient cities of Rome and 
Jerusalem as more densely packed with people 
than any of our modern cities. As a matter 
of fact, they were not. We think of oriental 
cities as more densely populated than the 
occidental ; but again we are mistaken. We 
have read much recently about the dense pop- 
ulation of China ; but the most closely packed 
portion of Pekin holds scarcely more than 
half as many people to the acre as the most 
densely populated portion of London. In the 
heart of Boston there is at least one acre as 
crowded as any in London, and the heart of 
New York can boast of more people to the 
acre than any other portion of the earth. One 
would suppose that in such districts there 
would be a strong spirit of neighborliness. 
The truth is that in the dense portions of our 
great cities men, women and children starve 
and no one knows that they were hungry 
till they are dead. If a thief wishes to 



Common People as Neighbors i6g 

hide from his pursuers, or a murderer to 
escape the officers of the law, he does not 
hasten to the wilderness or take up his abode 
in a country district. He runs for the most 
crowded portion of the city. That is the 
loneliest place of the earth. There no one 
inquires as to his neighbor's business, and 
few care whether one comes or goes, lives 
or dies. 

Some years ago a young man and woman 
of this vicinity went West, and engaged in 
the business of raising cattle. Later, the wife 
wrote home that at first it was very lonely, 
because there were no neighbors. " But it is 
better now," she added ; "a family has moved 
into our neighborhood, only five miles away." 
It is safe to infer that there was more real 
neighborly sentiment between these two fam- 
ilies five miles removed, more interest, more 
affection, more mutual helpfulness, than be- 
tween many families living on the same street 
or under the same roof in our cities. One 
finds more true neighborliness in a country 



7/0 Common People as Neighbors 

district than in a city ; and sometimes it seems 
that, the fewer the inhabitants, the stronger 
is the neighborhood spirit. Often this interest 
degenerates into officious meddling with the 
personal affairs of one's neighbors ; but better 
this, better all the peeking and inquisitive 
questioning characteristic of the country, than 
the cold indifference of the crowded city. At 
any rate, it is practically impossible for a fam- 
ily in the country to live in isolation and die 
of starvation without the people next-door 
knowing about it. 

It is not at all uncommon for the city pastor 
to discover a family that has lived in a certain 
house on a crowded street for years and has 
not even a bowing acquaintance with the 
people on either side. Each person is likely 
to lay the blame for this disgraceful state of 
things upon all the rest, when as likely as not 
the fault is in the fault-finder. I once called 
upon a lady, and was entertained for half an 
hour with complaints about the coldness of 
the neighborhood. " No one cares for any one 



Common People as Neighbors lyi 

else," she declared. "Why," she said, "I do 
not even know the name of the people in the 
next house." " How long have you lived 
here .?" I asked. "Seven years." "And how 
long has the family next-door lived there .? " 
" Three years." The fact was that this woman 
had allowed people to live within speaking 
distance for three years and had not taken 
pains even to inquire their names. Yet she 
was ready to lay the blame upon the coldness 
of the neighborhood. I heard of a lady who 
made a good resolution that she would be more 
neighborly with the people in her immediate 
vicinity. "There," she said, "is the family 
which has just moved into the house down 
yonder. I will call at once." But something 
happened to prevent her calling immediately. 
At last there came a day when she could make 
the call, and she hastened to do so. She rang 
the bell, and asked for the family by name. 
The woman who came to the door astonished 
her by saying that this family had moved away 
two years before. She had been more than 



i'/2 Common People as Neighbors 

two years in performing an act of simple 
neighborly courtesy. 

What I want to urge upon you is this 
homely virtue of neighborliness. There is 
something horrible in the fact that in the 
midst of a multitude of people a man or 
woman may be lonely, homesick, hungry for 
a friendly word, a kindly expression of sym- 
pathy. I know the excuse. Our lives are 
full. There is no room, no time for new 
acquaintances, much less new friendships. 
But that is really no excuse. Our lives ought 
not to be so full that there is no room for acts 
of neighborly kindness. Let us empty them 
of some things in order to make room for 
this. 

It seems like a little thing, a call, a hand- 
shake, a kind word as one passes upon the 
street; but such little things make all the 
difference between a life with a sense of com- 
panionship and a life with a consciousness of 
loneliness. I remember to have heard an 
elderly clergyman tell of an act of courtesy 



Common People as Neighbors lyj 

that stands out in his life after the lapse of 
many years as one of his most joyful recollec- 
tions. He and his young wife went to take 
charge of a struggling church in the heart of 
a great city. They knew no one in the neigh- 
borhood into which they moved. Coming 
from a small community, the thought of the 
crowded city was something of a terror. The 
man had selected the house and moved in 
some furniture, and then he and his wife came 
to it, homesick, filled with that doleful senti- 
ment which all who have left home for a 
strange community can understand. With 
long faces they climbed the front steps and 
unlocked the door to enter this narrow brick 
abode, — a house in the midst of a city block. 
The carpets were not down ; the furniture was 
in disorder ; the place was not home. It was 
an empty shell, without love, without sym- 
pathy. But as they entered the sitting-room 
their eyes were gladdened by a little bunch of 
flowers on the table. Where had they come 
from ? They discovered that the next-door 



//^ Common People as Neighbors 

neighbor had sent them as a welcome to these 
pilgrims from a strange land. Immediately 
the place became home-like. Their hearts 
were lightened. There was at least one 
person who had signified, in this way, that 
she was glad to have them come. It was a 
simple act, that cost the neighbor little effort, 
but it made the city wilderness blossom like 
the rose for the lives of two lonely people. 

I know that there is always a chance that 
the person who performs some kindly act like 
that will receive a rebuff. It is the fear of 
this rebuff that hinders a great many sensitive 
persons from doing neighborly acts. But 
such rebuffs are very few. Every minister 
makes hundreds of calls every year. He finds 
his v/ay into scores of homes where there is a 
question whether he will be welcome. Once 
in a thousand times he will be given to under- 
stand that the people see through his con- 
temptible motive ; that they know he is trying 
to inveigle them into hiring a pew so that his 
salary may be increased. Of course, that is 



Common People as Neighbors 7/5 

the real motive of every minister, and when 
people give him to understand that they esti- 
mate his call at its true value he ought not to 
be offended. But this occurs only once in a 
thousand times, while in nine hundred and 
ninety-nine instances he receives a welcome 
and feels that his call has been a real service. 
So it is possible that occasionally your neigh- 
borly call or kind conduct may be miscon- 
strued. But such will not be the case twice 
in a life-time. It is worth while to take that 
small chance for the sake of the brightness 
which the other occasions will bring into the 
lives of your neighbors, and into your own 
life as well. 

I am by no means urging that one shall 
give up his old friends in order to make new 
ones, or that one shall try to admit every one 
to the circle of his intimate friendship. When 
we are told that we should love our neighbors 
we ought to remember that love is a matter 
of degree. A man must love his own wife 
and children with an intensity the like of 



I'j6 Common People as Neighbors 

which he cannot give even to his intimate 
friends. He has a right to love his friends 
more strongly than he loves his neighbors. 
Every individual has a right to his small circle 
of loved-ones. It really ought to be a small 
circle, composed of tens rather than hundreds. 
Every person has a right to be exclusive in 
his most intimate affections. As a matter of 
course, people will be divided into groups. 
They are bound together by common interests 
and aims in life. Here is a little group of 
people who are drawn together by their 
mutual love of Browning's poetry. Their 
friendships are cultivated by their mutual 
interests. There is something for them to 
talk about, something for them to love in 
common. This will, of necessity, be an ex- 
clusive group. Those who do not love 
Browning will be excluded ; or, rather, they 
will exclude themselves. There is not the 
mutual interest or the common subject for 
exchange of thought. A man who does not 
care for the poet mxight be voted into a 



Common People as Neighbors lyy 

Browning society, pay his dues, attend the 
meetings ; but he would be only an outsider 
after all. 

So people are divided into groups. One 
group is interested in music ; another in social 
reform ; a third in golf ; a fourth in the public 
schools. Still another may be interested in 
simply making and displaying wealth ; — who 
can wear the most diamonds, drive the best 
team, give the most luxurious banquets .'* 
This latter is a contemptible tie to bind 
people together. In our time, what is called 
" the best society " generally means the 
richest society. It is often far from being 
best. It is neither the most intellectual nor 
the most moral nor the most public-spirited. 
Still I am ready to contend for the right of 
the vulgar rich to make wealth the test of 
their fellowship, if they want to. The loss is 
theirs. They exclude the very people whose 
company might be of some benefit to them. 
I cannot see why any honest and earnest man 
or woman should long to be admitted to a 



iy8 Common People as Neighbors 

circle of society where the badge of fellowship 
is the display of gorgeous apparel or the pos- 
session of a large bank-account. The noblest 
people of the world v/ould have been excluded 
from such society. Jesus of Nazareth, with 
his peasant's garb, his Galilean dialect, his 
entire lack of "possessions," would never have 
been admitted to " the best society " of Boston 
or New York. But that would not have 
troubled him. He preferred the company of 
intelligent fishermen to that of selfish and 
sordid wealth. But even the circle of Jesus 
was exclusive. It excluded these very selfish 
rich; or, rather, their selfishness excluded 
them. " It is easier for a camel to go through 
the eye of a needle," said he, " than for a rich 
man to enter into this social company whose 
intense interest is the building of God's king- 
dom." So it is entirely natural for people to 
divide into groups, and, as each person may 
rightly bestow his affections intensely and 
associate intimately with comparatively a small 
group of people, so he ought to concede the 



Common People as Neighbors lyg 

same right to others and find no fault if he is 
not inckided in the group. 

We should recognize that it is impossible 
for a person to be a friend to every one. The 
cultivation of friendship requires time and 
intimate companionship. Some persons have 
the happy faculty of making friends rapidly. 
James G. Blaine could, in an hour's drive with 
a farmer, knit the man to him in bonds of 
friendship that would last a life-time. But 
even such a man could not become the per- 
sonal friend of every one. Most of us have 
not even his faculty. We have not the power 
nor the time to win a large circle of friends. 
Each one has a right to his own Hmited circle 
of friends into whose life he has entered in 
close and intelligent companionship. 

But all this does not prevent a person, as 
he goes and comes among his neighbors, from 
assuming a friendly attitude. No man is in 
such a hurry that he cannot shout a cheerful 
salutation, or whistle a jovial whistle to the 
very dogs that cross his path. *' Life is not 



i8o Common People as Neighbors 

so short but that there is always time for 
courtesy," says Emerson. So there is no one 
who has not time to perform neighborly kind- 
ness. 

And you are not to suppose for a moment 
that the reward of your kindness is altogether 
with the neighbor to whom you are kind. 
Such conduct reacts upon one, and makes his 
own life joyful. Years ago a friend and I 
were tramping through a portion of Switzer- 
land. We were there to see the mountains. 
That was the important thing, — that we 
should witness the glory of the hills, and 
bring away with us a \dvid recollection of all 
this beauty to make our hearts glad after our 
return home. As we tramped along we saw 
two peasant-women, after the manner of the 
country, drawing a heavy load of hay around 
a sharp curve toward the barn where they 
would shortly store it away. A shower was 
at hand and they must hurry. With panting 
breath and straining muscles they pulled, but 
in their haste they turned too short an angle, 



Common People as Neighbors i8i 

and over went the load. Dumb with dismay 
they stood and looked at the wreck. The 
men were far away, and the women not able 
to right the wagon. Then my friend and I, 
with the surplus physical energy gained by a 
Summer's tramping, and to the amazement of 
the women, put our shoulders to the load and, 
with the assistance of the peasants, set the 
cart on its wheels again, tossed on the hay, 
and pushed the whole load into the barn just 
as the first drops of rain pattered on the roof. 
The women were too astonished to invite us 
to remain out of the storm, so we got wet ; 
but that did not matter, — we found shelter 
anon. But now a curious thing came to pass. 
I have forgotten in what part of Switzerland 
this occurred ; cannot recall the mountains or 
the natural scenery which we beheld that day. 
But if I were an artist, I could paint a picture 
of that door-yard, the load of hay, and the 
sun-burned faces of those peasant -women. I 
thought that I was doing them a favor ; but 
really the favor was to me. They have for- 



i82 Common People as Neighbors 

gotten all about the incident, years ago, but it 
is a joyful recollection still to those who did 
the neighborly act. 

So it is all through life. It is not what 
others do to help you that makes you happy, 
so much as what you do to help others. In our 
ignorance we generally go upon the principle 
that the way to win happiness is to do as little 
for others, and oblige them to do as much for 
us, as possible. But the converse of that 
rule marks the real road to joy : to exact as 
little, and do as much, as possible. It is more 
blessed to give than to receive ; more blessed 
to serve than to be served. The happiest 
people in the world are those who cultivate in 
themselves that spirit of neighborliness which 
makes the community in which they live 
homelike. 

Let me remind you also that the strongest 
and most abiding affection is won by the 
simple, kindly, sympathetic acts and words 
which belong to our lives as neighbors. We 
respect the man who writes a great book ; we 



Common People as Neighbors i8j 

honor the man who leads a great army ; we 
revere the great scientist, and are grateful to 
the person who has shown us a truth. But 
we love people who are kind. If I were to 
ask each one of you to name the best person 
that you ever knew, half of you would say, 
"Aunt Mary," or "Uncle Jo," or aunt or 
uncle someone. Very likely the person was 
not your aunt or uncle at all, but was adopted 
aunt or uncle to every one. Why has Irving 
Bacheller's story of " Uncle Eb " won such a 
large place for itself in the affection of the 
common people .? Is it because he has told 
us a strange tale, the like of which we never 
heard before ; because he has painted a char- 
acter such as none of us ever knew .'* Oh, no. 
As we have read his story, each has seemed 
to see all that he describes, and to be person- 
ally acquainted with the characters he sketches, 
because we all have known people very like 
the persons about whom he writes. There is 
an " Uncle Eb " somewhere in the experience 
of each one of us, some great-hearted, self- 



iS^f Common People as Neighbors 

forgetful, homely, kindly man. Surely each 
of us can recall some dear old lady who, when- 
ever any one was ill, was sure to run over with 
a glass of jelly, and, having come, would "just 
take off her things and help a little." No 
one's hand so cool to a fevered brow ; no one's 
voice so soothing to a disordered brain; no 
one's sympathy so helpful in the dark hours 
of life. But this old lady never did a great 
act. She could not write a grammatical sen- 
tence. Yet how people love her ! and when 
she gets through with life, how the whole 
neighborhood will say, " She was good to 
me," and will speak of her as a saint. 

I recall a man and a woman who, for many, 
many years, lived in a small white house in 
the center of a country village. He was a 
country doctor, and she was nurse, helper, 
adviser, friend, to the whole community. They 
grew old and wrinkled and white-headed to- 
gether. Whenever there was a call of dis- 
tress, " Doctor Charlie " would hitch up the 
old horse and start to lend a hand. Rich and 



Common People as Neighbors i8j 

poor, great and small, were all alike to him. 
Was it a bitter winter's night, and was the 
snow piled high ? No matter. Some mother's 
baby was dying ten miles away, and so " Aunt 
Ann " would bundle the old man up and send 
him out into the storm, and " Doctor Charlie " 
would go and fight with death for the life of a 
baby. It came to pass that for all the children 
in that country-side he was like a second 
father. He brought them into the world, 
nursed them to manhood and womanhood, 
and, when they became men and women 
and had children of their own, he was still 
"Doctor Charlie," father to them all. He 
was never known to send a bill. Those who 
could, paid him. Those who could not, or 
would not, — well, no one ever accused him 
of working for money. After many years he 
died, full of good works, and the people came 
for many miles and crowded the old village 
church to the street to say good-bye to 
" Doctor Charlie." And " Aunt Ann " was left 
alone. Alone ? Let me tell you about that. 



iS6 Common People as Neighbors 

Three or four years, after the death of the 
old physician, I was staying for a day in the 
little white house with the feeble and aged 
woman. We talked of many things. After 
a while I noticed that the school opposite had 
been dismissed. A crowd of little people 
came hurrying across the street with shout 
and laughter, straight to " Aunt Ann's " door. 
She tottered to the door and let them in, call- 
ing each by name. Into the sitting-room they 
came, nearly filling it, hats off, silent as little 
images, and all gazing in one direction. I 
followed their eyes, and saw a life-size portrait 
of a white-haired old man, with kindest of 
faces, eyes that shone with quaint good humor, 
mouth that was ready to shout to those young- 
sters standing there. Then without a word 
they went away. The old lady explained that 
this was a common custom with the chil- 
dren. They came in droves almost every 
day to look at " Doctor Charhe's " picture. 
And then they went out and laughed and 
shouted and tumbled over each other as be- 



Common People as Neighbors iSy 

fore, just as " Doctor Charlie " would like to 
have them. 

Am I wrong in saying that I would rather 
be a man like that than to have written 
"Paradise Lost" or command the armies of 
Napoleon ? 

Of course, it is impossible to be such a 
neighbor to a whole great city as one can be 
in a country village. But every city is divided 
into neighborhoods, and there is no reason why 
the same neighborly spirit may not be culti- 
vated in these small groups as in those other 
small groups of the country community. 

But I would not have you miss the great 
lesson in true neighborliness that Jesus taught 
in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The 
lesson is this : There is no line of demarkation 
which separates one from the obligations of 
kindness and helpfulness. To the Samaritan 
journeying over the robber-infested road be- 
tween Jerusalem and Jericho, the fallen Jew 
was, in the restricted sense, not a neighbor at 
all. He did not live in the same community. 



i88 Common People as Neighbors 

The Jew hated the Samaritan, and was hated 
in return. Very hkely if these two men had 
passed each other in health, this very Jew 
would have spat at the man from Samaria. 
You could not feel greater revulsion against 
taking care of a bruised, naked, diseased China- 
man than that Samaritan must have felt against 
caring for the maltreated Jew. But here was 
a man in trouble. That was enough. So he 
bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, 
and set him on his own beast and brought him 
to an inn, and took care of him. Holy picture 
of the most sincere and generous conduct ! 

Who is my neighbor .? The man who has 
need of my friendly assistance or my sym- 
pathetic word. Who is your neighbor } He 
is the man who lives next door. But more, 
he is the man who works in your shop, the 
man who runs your engine, the black-handed 
Irishman who shovels coal and oils the machin- 
ery. Did you, who may be a kind of God to 
this man in the cellar, ever inquire after his 
health or prosperity } That man has a flock 



fifa 



Common People as Neighbors i8g 

of babies somewhere that he loves as you love 
your children. One of them may be ill, and 
an orange from you would be like a gift of 
gold. Did you ever think that the little cash- 
girls in our great stores have homes some- 
where ; that they are really human, and that 
a kind word from you might make a difference 
in their lives 1 Did you ever think that the 
Chinaman who keeps the laundry may be as 
homesick in America among all these strange- 
looking foreigners as you would be in China 
among a host of Celestials } Did you ever 
think that the girl who does your housework 
or your dressmaking may be thirsting for a 
kind v/ord, or hungry for the simplest kind- 
ness } Why should we not bestow such 
kindness } In doing so we are but repaying 
a tithe of the good which has been done 
to us. 

" Half the world is laboring to-day for you ; 

The Chinese coolie is hard at work plucking tea-leaves or 

wading in the rice-fields for you ; 
The Southern Negro, the fellah of the Nile, are sowing 

cotton under the blazing sun for you ; 



igo Common People as Neighbors 

Factory men and women and young girls and little chil- 
dren, at home and abroad, are leading cheerless, 
steam-driven lives for you ; 

Farm-laborers on the prairie are toiling with sweating 
brows from sunrise to sunset for you ; 

You have slaves in every clime to-day, suffering every 
degree of weariness and degradation — and all for 
you. 

What are you doing for them ? 

How, then, do your books stand ? 

Is the balance hopelessly against you ? 

If so, acknowledge your bankruptcy ; tell yourself no lies ; 
begin life again. 

Henceforth insist upon giving more than you get, and on 
serving rather than being served ; 

Even the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, 
but to minister." 



VIII 

Common People Climbing 



The Lord let the house of a brute to the soul of a man. 

And man said, " Am I your debtor ? " 
And the Lord, — " Not yet ; but make it as clean as you 
can, 

And I will let you a better. — Tennyson. 



All the past we leave behind, 
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world, 
Fresh and strong the world w'e seize, world of labor and 
the march, 

Pioneers ! O pioneers ! 

We detachments steady throwing, 
Down the edges, through the passes, up the m.ountai-ns 

steep, 
Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the un- 
known ways, 
Pioneers ! O pioneers ! 

Till with sound of trumpet, 
Far, far off the daybreak call — hark ! how loud and clear 

I hear it wind, 
Swift ! to the head of the army ! — swift ! spring to your 
places, 
Pioneers! O pioneers ! — Whitman. 

(192) 



VIII 

Common People Climbing 



THE best analogy for life is a journey. 
Every poet since poets began to sing 
has used this figure of speech. Charles 
Darwin writing as a scientist entitles his 
book the " Descent of Man." Henry Drum- 
mond, with more poetic insight, writes upon 
the same subject and entitles his book the 
"Ascent of Man." Man is forever pushing 
up the side of a steep mountain ; the summit 
is shrouded in clouds so that no one knows 
what lies at the top ; the pathway is rugged 
and sometimes beset with precipices and cov- 
ered with thorns and jagged rocks. The feet 
of the pilgrim are torn, his limbs grow weary, 



ig^f. Common People Climbing 

he longs for rest, but there is something within 
that impels him to go forward. However 
beautiful the spot in which he finds himself, 
he is never quite satisfied with it ; he seems 
to see a brighter place just beyond. So he 
leaves the present and pushes on toward that 
which is to be. 

The revelations of modern science have 
taught us that, unnumbered centuries ago, the 
whole human race was dwelling in the forests 
and swamps, the low-lands of sensuality, 
brutality, beastiality. The human animal had 
but just emerged from the brute. If some 
superior being from another sphere had been 
privileged to visit our earth half a million 
years ago, what would he have seen t He 
would have seen great stretches of forests 
composed of gigantic trees, and inhabited by 
fierce beasts, some of them of enormous size. 
He would have seen the air swarming with 
birds of prey, creatures fearful to contemplate. 
He would have seen the ocean and the rivers 
inhabited by ferocious lizards and great fish 



Common People Climbing igs 

with teeth like scythes. He would probably 
have witnessed battles between these fearful 
beasts of the forest, dragons of the air and 
serpents of the deep. The air would be spht 
with screams and roars and yells. The waters 
would be dyed with blood. Trees would be 
uprooted in the conflict between these ferocious 
creatures. 

Perhaps if this being from another sphere 
had dared to penetrate the forest and look 
closely enough, he might have discovered a 
poor little animal which sometimes walked 
upright and sometimes went upon all fours, 
an animal with no natural weapons of defense, 
no tusks, no claws, no steel-like scales to ward 
off the attacks of his enemies. He would 
have seen this creature scurrying in terror 
away from the fearful brutes with which he 
was surrounded, making his home in the 
depths of dark caves, eating roots, naked, or 
wrapped in the skins of the beasts which 
other beasts had slain ; a poor, defenseless, 
hunted being, dirty, sensual, cruel. He would 



ig6 Common People Climbing 

have seen these creatures, as if not satisfied 
with all the terrors with which their lives were 
surrounded, carrying on perpetual wars against 
each other, tearing one another to pieces, 
eating each other's flesh. Would this visitor 
have dared, think you, to prophesy that this 
puny animal would conquer all the rest and 
come to be master of the world ? 

At the World's Columbian Exposition was 
exhibited a painting which attracted much 
attention. It was entitled, " From the gnat's 
point of view." A gnat, painted many times 
its natural size, was represented as hiding 
under an enormous leaf, while about and above 
him circled those creatures which prey upon 
the lives of gnats. There was a mighty 
dragon-fly. Gigantic beetles, gorgeous ser- 
pents, a giant toad, ants armed with fierce 
mandibles, crawled in search of the puny 
gnat. It was a true picture of insect-life 
magnified thousands of times. But it was 
more than that. It was a very good pict- 
ure of what must have been the condition 



Common People Climbing igy 

of the world in the earliest days of human 
history. Man was a gnat placed in a world 
of terror, with destruction on every side. He 
w^ould be a brave prophet who, looking upon 
this picture " from the gnat's point of view," 
should declare that the gnat would come off 
victorious over all these enemies. No one 
but a God would have foreseen that this puny 
creature, man, would prove victor over the 
forces of the world which were pitted against 
him. Professor Morse is accustomed to illus- 
trate the natural weakness of the human 
animal by saying, " Imagine a naked man, 
with no weapon at hand, attacked by a rat. 
The rat would certainly come off victorious." 

But there was one respect in which this 
weak creature was equipped to wage victorious 
conflict against his mightiest enemies. In 
that great head, so out of proportion to the 
rest of his body, was a double supply of grey 
matter. He was capable of thought. As he 
hid in his dark cave away from his enemies 
he set this grey matter to work to devise 



ig8 Common People Climbing 

means for his own protection. He hit upon 
the idea of carrying in his weak hand, when 
he went forth into the forest, a stick or a 
stone and of using this for a weapon. Later 
he thought to sharpen his stick for a spear, 
or to select a stone with an edge for a battle- 
axe. Later yet, some human creature noticed, 
by accident perhaps, that if two stones were 
struck together a spark was born, and that 
this spark might be induced to kindle dry 
wood into a flame. With the birth of fire 
began the rapid development of man. For 
with fire he could keep from freezing in the 
coldest weather; with fire he could perfect 
his weapons; with fire he could cook his 
food. 

The law of natural selection, which for 
centuries had been working toward the pro- 
duction of that which is physically strong, had 
now begun to work in another direction. He 
was fittest to survive who was intellectually 
strong ; the man who possessed and used his 
power to think won the right to live and to 



Common People Climbing igg 

propagate his kind. Out of this superior 
intelligence was born the idea of action in 
concert, so that armies were formed, the State 
was born. Later this superior intelligence 
revealed to man that if people would act 
together they must have respect to each 
other's property and life, The moral law 
was born. Men began to say, <'Thou shalt 
not kill a member of thine own tribe ; thou 
shalt not steal from an ally; thou shalt not 
lie to those who fight by thy side." At first 
these moral precepts applied only to the 
immediate circle of one's kinsmen and tribes- 
men. It v/as not thought wrong to kill and 
steal from and lie to an outsider. Later this 
moral law was seen to apply to all humanity ; 
that is, it was seen so to apply by those who 
are most enlightened. The moral law is still 
by many put in application only to one's 
countrymen or the members of the same 
branch of the human family. By many it is 
not thought to be wrong for the Anglo-Saxon 
to kill defenseless Chinamen or to *' loot " their 



200 Common People Climbing 

goods. What would be called treachery be- 
tween individuals is not only justified between 
armies, but actually taught as military science 
in the most advanced scientific schools of the 
world. The highest mihtary art consists in 
sneaking behind the enemy and shooting him 
in the back. 

But even this is an advance, and man is 
getting ahead. Civilized nations have agreed 
that torture of enemies is wrong, and for the 
most part it is not practised, — though, to be 
sure, what is called jocosely "the water-cure," 
and is being practised in the Philippine Islands 
to-day to induce natives to betray their com- 
rades or surrender their hidden arms, is a 
most fiendish kind of torture. It is agreed 
that certain forms of weapons are too vile to 
be used, even though " dum-dum " bullets and 
lydite shells are in demand in South Africa. 
It is agreed that indiscriminate destruction 
of property, and stealing the goods of non- 
combatants, are not commendable, even though 
the very missionaries of Christianity were 



Common People Climbing 201 

recently engaged in that work in China. We 
are getting ahead, and man is making advance 
up the mountain of progress. 

This journey up the mountain seems very 
slow, but the great column of humanity is 
moving faster and faster toward the summit. 
The progress that I have sketched for you, 
from the beast to the human being capable of 
withstanding his enemies, possessing some 
crude form of social organization and the 
rudiments of the moral law, required hundreds 
of thousands of years. The process of extend- 
ing the bounds of human society, so that they 
should include not only the tribe but the 
nation, and the extension of the moral law so 
that it should apply to the many and not to 
the few, required unnumbered centuries. But 
great advancement has been made toward 
universal morality within the past two or three 
hundred years. 

In a lecture upon the Hfe of Oliver Crom- 
well, Newell Dwight Hillis paints a graphic 
picture of the moral condition of England in 



202 Common People Climbing 

1630, about the time when our forefathers 
were settling Boston : 

" One bright morning, with St. Paul's at his 
back, Cromwell entered Ludgate Circus. In 
the midst of the Circus stood a scaffold, and 
around it was a great throng, crowding and 
pressing toward the place of torture. At the 
foot of the scaffold was a venerable scholar, 
his white hair flowing upon his shoulders, a 
man of stainless character and spotless life, 
renowned for his devotion, eloquence and 
patriotism. When the executioner led the 
aged pastor up the steps, the soldiers tore 
off his garments. First he was whipped, 
until the blood ran in streams down his back ; 
both nostrils were slit and his ears cropped 
off ; hot irons were brought, and two letters, 
S. S., — 'sower of sedition,' — were burned 
into his forehead. What crime had this 
pastor committed } Perhaps he had lifted a 
firebrand upon the king's palace ; perhaps he 
had organized some foul gunpowder-plot to 
overthrow the throne itself. Perhaps he 



Common People Climbing 20j 

had been guilty of treason, or some name- 
less sin against the State. But the read- 
ing of the decision of the judge and the 
decree of the punishment put an end to 
Cromwell's doubts. It seemed that, a fort- 
night before, the aged pastor had been com- 
manded to give up his extempore prayers and 
the singing of Psalms, and to read the written 
prayers and sing the hymns prescribed by the 
State church. But the gentle scholar had 
disregarded- the commands, and on the follow- 
ing Sunday walked in the ways familiar and 
dear to him by reason of long association, and 
dared to sing the same old Psalms and lifted 
his heart to God in extempore prayer, after 
the manner of his fathers." 

This was his crime, and the penalty exacted 
was not sufficiently horrible to excite more 
than curiosity. Men and women, and some- 
times little children, were hanged in gibbets 
for crimes that, in our day, would hardly 
be called misdemeanors. There were a hun- 
dred offenses against the king — offenses 



204 Common People Climbing 

such as speaking of him with disrespect or 
killing a rabbit upon one of his preserves — 
which were punishable with death, sometimes 
preceded by torture. Even at the beginning 
of the nineteenth century the man who marred 
Westminster bridge was punished for his 
offense by hanging. 

If you think that the human race has made 
no advance up the mountain of progress, listen 
for a moment to a further picture of the social 
condition of England at the time of Cromwell, 
painted by the master of rhetoric before 
quoted : 

'' If our age is the era of the rise and reign 
of the common people, that was an age when 
the middle class was as yet almost unknown. 
My lord dwelt in a castle — the people dwelt 
in mud huts. He wore purple and fine linen — 
his people wore coats of sheepskin, slept on 
straw, ate black bread, knew sorrow by day 
and misery by night. Did a farmer sow a 
field and reap the harvest 1 Every third 
shock belonged to the lord of the castle. 



Common People Climbing 205 

Did the husbandman drive his flocks afield ? 
In the autumn every third sheep and bullock 
belonged to my lord. And so it generally 
came about that the serf fronted the winter 
with an empty granary, and the cry of his 
children was exceeding bitter. There were 
few bridges across the streams, there was no 
glass in the farmer's window, not one peasant 
in a hundred could read or write, not one in a 
thousand owned a book, sanitation was almost 
unknown, every other babe died in infancy; 
if the upper classes came out of the black 
death almost unscathed, about a third of the 
peasant class was swept off by that scourge, 
which the physicians now know was caused 
by insufficient food and decayed grain. It 
was an era of ignorance and brutality among 
the poor, an era of mobs and of criminals. 
When Cromwell rode up to London, he passed 
between a lane of gibbets where corpses hung 
rotting in chains. Highwaymen rode even 
into London, at nightfall, and tied their horses 
in Hyde Park, robbed people in the streets, 



2o6 Common People Climbing 

broke into stores and rode away unmolested. 
Every fourth house was a saloon, and had in 
the windows signs reading, ' Dead drunk for 
ha'- penny, and a drunk with a straw to lie 
upon for a penny.' The king's palace was a 
center of drunkenness and gambling. The 
Secretary of State was notorious as the great- 
est drunkard and the most unlucky gambler 
of his era. The Prime Minister was allowed 
to appear at the opera-house with his mistress 
and was esteemed the finest pubUc man of 
his century." 

So much for the past. Such a backward 
look over the swamps and poisonous morasses 
out of which the race has so recently crawled 
may help us to realize that, in spite of all the 
evils of the present hour, progress is actually 
being made, and the people as a whole are 
standing higher up the hill than ever before. 

Now, I want you to notice the method by 
which the people ascend the mountain. The 
human race is not formed like an army, stand- 
ing shoulder to shoulder in regular order and 



Common People Climbing 2oy 

solid column, and moving forward with rhyth- 
mical footsteps that beat as one. We all are 
struggling up the hill, impelled by the haunting 
unrest with which God has gifted the soul of 
man, and urged from behind by the fear of 
what we have left there. We are baited and 
driven on by unseen forces. Now and then 
some man with superior energy forges ahead 
and gains a height, never beyond calling- 
distance, but still much loftier than that 
occupied by the multitude. Then this lone 
pilgrim, enchanted by the view which he 
obtains, calls back, and urges the multitude 
on, crying, " It is better up here ! The air is 
purer, the scenery grander ! " One would 
suppose that the multitude, hearing such a 
voice, would respond to it, rejoice in the mes- 
sage, and hurry forward with redoubled energy. 
But, somehow, that is not human nature. 
First of all the crowd begins to laugh. '^ Ha, 
ha," they cry ; " look at the fool ! He thinks 
that he sees more than we. Really he sees 
nothing at all All he sees is in his mind's 



2o8 Common People Climhing 

eye, the eye of a disordered mind. Ha, ha," 
cries the multitude. But the man on the 
heights keeps on calHng. Then people begin 
to get angry. They curse him. They revile 
him. They declare he is trying to coax the 
whole human race over a precipice. They 
throve stones and mud at him. And in the 
end they probably drag him down from the 
height, and kill him, and cast contempt upon 
his corpse. But later, one man will begin to 
say to another, " I wonder what he saw up 
there, anyway ! " and they will cHmb to find 
out, and will discover that what the scout 
affirmed was true. And then more and more 
will climb, until this spot, explored by the man 
of courage and energy first of all, becomes the 
camping-ground of humanity. 

Strange that the human race can never 
learn to value its great leaders until after they 
are dead ! It is just as true to-day as it was 
in Cromwell's time, or in Savonarola's time, 
or in the time of Jesus, that we common 
people are ready to hoot and jeer at uncommon 



Common People Climbing 2og 

leaders who could show us the pathway to the 
higher life. Sometime the world, classing 
them among the heroes and saints, will build 
monuments to men for whom we ordinary 
people of our time express only contempt and 
hatred; and we shall be remembered, if 
remembered at all, only as the Pharisees of 
old, who, standing by the foot of the cross of 
Jesus, cried, " He saved others, himself he 
cannot save." 

None of us are satisfied with the world as 
it is. There is a God-given unrest in the 
hearts of all. You and I can hear just as 
plainly as Moses, if we will but listen, the 
voice from the cloud, crying, " Speak unto the 
children of Israel, that they go forward." 
And yet, how the great mass of the people 
are holding back ! Those who are intent 
upon the purification of our politics are a 
handful in comparison to the whole. The 
majority are ready to cry, " Nonsense ! It 
cannot be done. These reformers are cranks, 
fools, self-seekers." Those who are intent 



210 Common People Climbing 

upon the abolition of war, with all its horrors, 
are even now but a poor minority, and the 
multitude of the people are ready to say, 
" These are cowards, knaves. They have no 
patriotism." Those who recognize the fact 
that the means for producing wealth have 
multiplied twenty times in a hundred years, 
so that to-day one worker can do the work of 
twenty at the beginning of the nineteenth 
century, and who, seeing this, feel that there 
should be a more equitable distribution of 
this wealth produced by the labor of all, are 
denounced as among the anarchists. Those 
who see that the church is not everything that 
it should be, and who propose to make it 
something larger and better, are most likely 
called atheists or fanatics. We are engaged 
in the same business as the men of the past, — 
stoning the prophets, and afterward building 
their sepulchers ! If you and I could return 
to earth two hundred years from now, and 
read the history of our own time as written by 
the historian of that day, I am sure we should 



Common People Climbing 212 

be surprised to learn the names of those given 
a place in the temple of fame. " What ! " we 
will find ourselves crying ; " that fellow ? I 
thought that we had buried him so deep that 
no one would ever hear of him again." 

On the other hand, I know that this con- 
servatism of the common people has its advan- 
tageous side. The pathway of progress is a 
straight and narrow road, and it is not very 
plain. There are many other paths that seem 
to run off from this narrow one, and there are 
always people who have taken these delusive 
roads and who cry with mighty voices that theirs 
is the only true way, and that all ought to leave 
everything else and follow them. It is prob- 
ably well that the majority of people are in no 
haste to follow in directions of which they are 
uncertain. 

But how, then, are we to know the real 
leaders from those who would take us astray } 
" Beware of false prophets (teachers, leaders) 
who come to you in sheep's clothing, but 
inwardly are ravening wolves. By their fruits 



212 Common People Climbing 

ye shall know them." Beware of the man 
who talks patriotism, yet is ready himself to 
thrust his hand into the public treasury. 
Beware of the man who talks social reform, 
yet whose private life is unclean. Beware of 
the man who preaches religion, yet in his 
private life manifests hate, envy and spite. 
In a word, beware of the man whose conduct 
does not accord with his profession. But 
where you see a man who utters a truth, and 
is ready to die for it ; a man who cries, " I 
see," and is ready to sacrifice his all that 
others may see, — follow that man ! Sacrifixe 
is the test of sincerity. The world knows 
this, and therefore, the sacrifice having once 
been made, the common people are ready to 
follow the man who has made it. Herein is 
the truth of the saying of Jesus, "If I be 
lifted up, I will draw all men unto me." The 
sacrifice of the cross was the test of the 
absolute sincerity of Jesus, and won for him 
the allegiance of the people. 

I should be blameworthy if I did not point 



Common People Clmbing 21 j 

out in this connection that the law of devel- 
opment, of progress, is not the only one that 
obtains in this human world of ours. There 
is another law which operates as inevitably, — 
one fearful to contemplate. It is the law of 
degeneration. ** If a man abide not in the 
vine, he is cast forth as a branch, and wither- 
eth." Let a man or a nation depart from the 
straight path of moral law which leads up the 
mountain of progress, and he or it will come 
to the region of precipices and avalanches, and 
to where all paths, instead of going up, go 
down once more toward the forest and the 
swamp. This law holds good for individuals 
and for nations. Who has not witnessed the 
degeneration of a man or woman .? Some one 
has had his face toward the height, but has, 
in the expressive phrase so often used, ^' gone 
astray," missed the path. And then we wit- 
ness a transformation. Literally and phys- 
ically before our eyes the person seems to be 
slowly transformed into a beast. The hands 
become like claws, the mouth takes on the 



2I/J. Common People Climbing 

snarl of a wolf, the eyes grow as cruel as those 
of a bird of prey, sensuality and greed are 
stamped on every feature. The person has 
taken the downward road toward the haunt of 
the beast from which the race as a whole 
has been centuries in climbing. The ancient 
teaching of transmigration contained a truth. 
It is possible for a man to become transformed 
into a beast. 

And if this law of degeneration holds as to 
the indiAddual life, it applies also to the life of 
the nation or the race. What has become of 
those mighty and dominating races of the 
past } The Babylonian civilization, where is 
it } Cast forth as a branch, and withered. It 
missed the path. Nineveh, where is she.'* 
Cast forth as a branch, and withered. She 
missed the path. Persia, Egypt, Greece, 
Rome, what has become of all these mighty 
nations of the past 1 Cast forth as branches, 
and withered. Have we any reason to suppose 
that this law of degeneration has ceased to 
operate in the life of the world t Nay, it is 



Common People Climbing 21^ 

as true to-day as in the centuries gone that 
the nation which does not stand true to its 
own highest ideals, which does not stand for 
justice and Hberty and enhghtenment ; that 
nation which within itself cultivates cruelty 
and greed, and the lust of power, will be cast 
forth as a branch, and withered. The prog- 
ress of the race will not cease ; but that por- 
tion of the race which does not abide in the 
eternal forces of righteousness will be driven 
away as chaff before the hurricane. This is 
the message of history. 

" The ruins of dynasties passed away 

In eloquent silence lie ; 
And the despot's fate is the same to-day 

That it was in the days gone by. 
Against all wrong and injustice done 

A rigid account is set ; 
For the God who reigned over Babylon 

Is the God who is reigning yet." 

From our brief study of the pathway over 
which the human race has come, and of the 
methods by which men are urged by unseen 
hands up, — up, still up, — may we not feel 



2i6 Common People Climbing 

sure that the golden age lies ahead, and not 
behind, that to-morrow will be better than 
to-day, as to-day is better than yesterday ? 
Under the providence of God, all things work 
together for good to the human race. God 
somehow makes even the sins and selfishness 
of mankind play their part in building mon- 
uments to his glory. It is the miracle of all 
the ages that from the brute should have come 
men who cry, <' Now are we the sons of 
God " ; that from the dust of the earth has 
been made that being who is capable of think- 
ing God's thoughts after him ; that out of 
savage brutality has blossomed the purity of 
self-sacrifice ; that from beastly lust has come 
the home, with all its holy joys ; that out of 
bloody wars and greedy, cruel conflicts was 
born the State; that out of fear and the 
horrible dread of death was bom religion ! 
Just as God sends a lily-root into the slime at 
the bottom of the lake, and from this loath- 
some material creates a blossom of pure white- 
ness, so out of the raw material of human 



Common People Climbing 21^ 

nature, hideous if we take not into considera- 
tion the latent possibilities contained therein, 
the eternal forces have caused to blossom all 
that makes us glad and proud to be men. 
And standing thus half-way up the mountain, 
with minds inspired with what we know of 
the past, and still impelled forward by the 
restless forces within our own souls, we may 
say,— 

" We know at last the future is secure ; 
Man is ascending toward eternity, 
And all things, good and evil, build the road. 
Yes, down in the thick of things, the men of greed 
Are thumping the inhospitable clay. 
By wondrous toils the men without the dream, 
Led onward by a something unawares. 
Are laying the foundation of the dream, 
The Kingdom of Fraternity foretold." 



I- 
II 



Publications of James H* "West Co., Boston, 

Health and a Day. 

By Dr. Lewis G. Janes, M.A., author of 
"Life as a Fine Art," "A Study of Prim- 
itive Christianity," "Evolution of Morals," 
"Social Ideals and Social Progress," etc. 
Cloth, gilt top, $1.00. 

" Give me health and a day, and I ivill make 
the pomp of em.2)eroi's ridicidous. "—'Emkrso:^. 

Contents: 1. The Unity of Life. 2. The Temple of 
the Holy Spirit. 3. Cleanliness and Godliness. 4. 
Health in the Home. 5. Food for Body and Mind. 
6. Education and Health. 7. Vocation and Avocation. 
8. Aspiration and Inspiration. 9. Travel and the Open 
Mind. 10. The Saving Value of Ideals, 11. The Min- 
istry of Pain. 12. Members of One Body. 13. Art 
and Life. 14. Opportunity. 

" The essentials of a healthy life. "We should have 
better men and women, better home-life, better pol- 
itics, if the lessons tendered here so graciously were 
taken well to heart."— The Nation. 

" This little book is a tonic for both sick and well. 
There is no spirit of controversy or of f addism in the 
suggestions as to health conditions of body and mind ; 
they are pervaded by a gentle spirit that easily wins 
the reader to confidence in their reasonableness. 
The book aims, however, at a wider outlook than that 
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touches on many themes which go to the filling out 
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Based upon The New Materialism and 
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" Surely, ' Through his garden walketh God ! " 
— Celia Thaxtek. 

Readers of Doctor Stockwell's previous work, 
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hook hy him on further high themes. Of the pre- 
vious work, high authorities have agreed that " it is 
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•' Here we have presented, in the most concise and 
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"Doctor Stockwell handles with power and skill 
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" Here is a volume that one should possess. Read 
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The Wit and Wisdom of Jesus. 

By Geokge Weight Buckley, author 
of "Carlyle and Emerson : A Contrast," 
"Politics and Morals," etc. Cloth, gilt 
top, $1.00. 

^^Humor is an invisible tear thro^igh a 
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Contents: Introduction. 1. Humor Versus Crit- 
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8. Vanquished Craft. 9. Hypocrisy and Self- Right- 
eousness. 10. Closing of the Conflict. Conclusion. 

" Mr. Buckley has furnished here abundant 
material for an instructive and thoughtful hour. 
His book is a good antidote or prophylactic to the 
conventionalism and literalism that bleach out the 
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" A presentation of the character and utterances 
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Contents : The Building of the House ; House 
Furnishing ; The Ideal of Beauty ; Flower Fur- 
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" togetherness." 

" In ' The House Beautiful,' Rev. 'William C. Gan- 
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and poetic insight, the essentials of a beautiful home, 
giving to flowers, books, and guests, for instance, 
their due place in its furnishing, while love is the 
bond that binds all together in gracious influence."— 
Literary World. 

•'Many practical suggestions, woven together by 
the loving desire that the great art of home-building 
should receive the study it deserves and so make 
every home a ' House Beautiful.' "—Public Opinion. 

" Where all is so good perhaps there is no best, 
though to our mind the section on ' The dear Togeth- 
erness ' is fullest of strength, sweetness and light 
Our readers can procure the little book for them- 
selves ; and if they want to be strengthened and lifted 
up, they will do so."— JJmit/. 



Pttblications of James H, "West Co«^ Boston, 

{Sixth Thousand.) 

Love Does It All. 

A "Life" Story. By Ida Lemon Hild- 
YARD. Cloth, 50 cents; white and gold 
edition, full gilt edges, in box, 75 cents. 

Contents: The Doctor; "At Your Conven- 
ance " ; The Visit ; John Temple and Lucy ; 
" Me and Sunny"; Supreme Joys; Looking in 
" Friendly " ; The Dear Young Lady ; Love 
Does It All. 

This striking "life " story, an admirable compan- 
ion-work to Mr. Gannett's "House Beautiful," and, 
like that, a notable gift-book for birthday, wedding, 
or Christmas, is destined to have a great popular in- 
fluence. No one who takes it up will lay it aside till 
every word is absorbed, and the reader, young or old, 
will rise from its perusal refreshed and ennobled. 

"One of the tenderest and most helpful stories 
ever written. Nothing could be simpler. God bless 
the woman who could write it J'^— Christian Register. 

"Short, pathetic, impressive; as able in the por- 
trayal of character as it is unpretending and touch- 
ing." — Congregationalist. 

"A lovely little story worthy to rank with ' Rab and 
his Friends.' Powerful in its very simplicity and 
sweetness."— T/ie Advance (Chicago). 

" The potency of unselfishness." — Minneapolis 
Journal. 

" It is almost not a story ; it is a breath of the great- 
est thing in the world."— ^Sf. Paul Dispatch. 



WDT/ 0/1 lOtf&t 



Ml 



1 COPY DEI. ^0 CAT, D!V. 
NOV. 20 1901 



NOV. n 1901 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ^ 

027 273 559 1 



